This is Lorenzo Johnson, and this is my latest article titled, “Innocent but Rapidly Falling Victim to the Machine of Death.” “Innocent until proven guilty” barely holds any weight when it comes down to African and Latino Americans along with poor whites. It’s not a mystery that an innocent prisoner spends an average of 12 and a half years in prison. That’s if justice is served.
There’s no accurate number of innocent men or women who are wrongfully in prison or unfortunately died in prison. In 2008, 129 death row prisoners was exonerated and freed, 17 of them using DNA evidence. Prosecutors continue to fight [against] reviewing DNA evidence to determine whether innocent prisoners has been put to death. In 2011, the Supreme Court backed prosecutors who hid exonerated witness and blood evidence from an innocent man they sent to death row for 14 years. See Connick v. Thompson.
The following is a quote from Connie Rice’s book titled, Power Concedes Nothing: “I have been baptized in the bowels of injustice. No course or prestigious stint or law review could match that experience. Death row has ripped off law school’s Socratic mask and shown me the sordid underbelly of our war of justice. Law school’s pristine parsing of constitutional principles, lofty notions of liberty, and abstractions of sanctity of due process have nothing to do with the mess I’ve seen on death circuit, and not one professor could answer the muffled questions screaming in the back of my mind. If we determine the course of important decision of any legal system, then how much integrity could our legal system really have? Law school had no answer to this question.”
Connie’s words are powerful. Being an innocent prisoner myself, I’m in the confines of the machine of death that has been torturing/killing the innocent for a long time. We live in times of social media. Social media is injustice’s worst nightmare. Why? It does not take the average of 12 and a half years for innocent prisoner to break a story, if they are in possession of the truth. Social media can break a wrongful conviction overnight to society worldwide. Now, it’s up to society to pay attention and start holding the government officials you vote into office accountable for freedom, justice, and equality for the fortunate and for the unfortunate. What’s the difference between slavery and mass incarceration? Injustice must come to an end, but that’s not possible until we bring it into the machine of death, the pain within. Free the innocent, Lorenzo Cat Johnson. For more information on the Free Lorenzo Johnson campaign, go to freelorenzojohnson.org or follow me on Twitter @freerenz, spelled R, E, N, Z.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
