How I Changed My Mind About the Jeffrey MacDonald Murder Case
Harvey Silverglate, a renowned civil liberties advocate [and NCRJ Advisor], has been an appellate attorney for MacDonald. He is outspoken about MacDonald’s innocence, and when I called him, I could hear the years of outrage in his voice over the way the case has proceeded. Silverglate believes that Jeffrey MacDonald has been railroaded, and that this railroading exposes disturbing trends in our federal criminal justice system. He worries that we are moving into a period in which the finality of verdicts is so zealously protected (a legacy, in part, of 9/11) that new evidence offers little hope of challenging them. MacDonald has had mostly good lawyers, though not always the appropriate ones. But Silverglate points out that those lawyers have been up against an increasingly perverse system in which ancient legal rights like habeas corpus have been tossed aside in the name of preserving convictions at any cost. (See Silverglate’s article on the case in Forbes.)
Posted by rbchatelle on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 @ 12:41PM
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Newsroom
No comments