A group of people who have been released and exonerated from prison, criminal lawyers and human rights defense organizations This Thursday they demanded that Governor Kathy Hochul sign the Wrongful Conviction Challenge Act (S. 7548).
This legislation, which was passed by the New York State Assembly and Senate this spring, is an important step in providing wrongfully convicted New Yorkers, the opportunity to clear their names.
This project that is only waiting for the signature of the state president, creates the way for for someone unjustly or wrongly convicted of a crime to have that conviction overturned, even if that person has pleaded guilty. This rule would eliminate the major limitations that currently exist in the courts to promote new evidence after a convicted case.
Under current law, New Yorkers who have pleaded guilty to a crime can challenge their conviction, only if the evidence was derived from DNA testing.
“All the data shows that an intolerable number of innocent people are being held in New York prisons, without the possibility of challenging their wrongful convictions. The governor has the opportunity to solve this problem. It is a step forward to modernize the administration of criminal justice that is a systematically racist model. “We can’t wait any longer,” declared activists from a coalition led by Voices of Community Leaders and Activists (Local-NY).
The defenders of this legal initiative are against the clock, since Hochul must sign the project before this Friday to become law this year.
While New York has a demonstrated problem with wrongful convictions, it is an outlier in failing to recognize that people who plead guilty may be innocent and therefore have the opportunity for redress in court.
For its part, Sergio De La Pava, Legal Director of New York County Defender Services (NYCDS) questions that innocent people continue to rot in our prisons, due to one of the most obsolete legal frameworks for exoneration in the country.
“We need a functional path to fair exoneration in our State, and we need it now,” he demanded.
The National Registry of Exonerations records that the 24% of the more than 3,400 people wrongfully convicted who were revealed to be innocent in the United States pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit.
A great pressure
The Wrongful Conviction Challenge Act, which was included in the People’s Budget of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian legislative caucus, improves the post-conviction relief framework by opening the possibilities of further testing and post-conviction appeals.
The other point is that a framework is established for the assignment of lawyers for those with claims of wrongful conviction.
New York is one of five states in the United States that does not grant the right to counsel in post-conviction cases, behind states like Texas and Alabama.
According to the testimonies of several former inmates and criminal lawyers, innocent people accused of serious crimes, who cannot afford bail, feel great pressure to plead guilty, because they fear being subjected to violence or sexual assault in preventive detention centers such as Rikers Island.
The other side of this drama, highlighted by the Protestants at the head of Hochul’s Manhattan office, is that people detained in the largest jail in New York They do not have regular access to their lawyers and cannot fully participate in their own defense.
The newspaper could not confirm independently whether this bill will be considered for signature in the next few hours, before the end of this calendar year.
2023-12-21 21:22:04
#Governor #Hochul #pressured #sign #Law #Challenge #Wrongful #Convictions #Diario
