Conservative Review’s Michelle Malkin joined SiriusXM host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Sam Sorbo for a Friday interview on Breitbart News Tonight to discuss the Manhattan Film Festival’s selection of an episode of her eponymous investigatory show profiling the wrongful convictions of several men.
The Manhattan Film Festival will be airing the CRTV episode of “Michelle Malkin Investigates” entitled “Railroaded: Surviving Wrongful Convictions” on Sunday. After the film’s screening, Malkin will attend a panel discussion with exonerees, exoneration lawyers, and family members.
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Malkin framed concern over wrongful convictions as transcending political divides. “What’s really edifying for me is that this is an issue that really crosses the political spectrum,” she said. “There can be common ground that’s forged among the left, center, and right, particularly for constitutional conservatives who worry about the police state.”
Malkin pointed to special counsel Robert Mueller’s ostensible investigation of the “Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election as illustrative of the “dangers of prosecutorial overreach” since Donald Trump became president.
Malkin discussed her investigation o wrongful convictions. “The episode follows the incredible plights o several exonerees,” she said. “Two of whom served over two decades in prison for crimes that they did not commit, and it’s really the flip-side of the Me Too movement, because I took a very special niche interest in men who were wrongfully accused and convicted of sexual assault and in the case of two law enforcement officers, one in Washington state and one in Texas of sexual crimes that includes children. Can you imagine, one of the most heinous crimes, and to be branded some kind of monster when you are completely innocent? You are victim, not only of prosecutorial overreach but of dirty cops, police investigators who are driven by tunnel vision and confirmation bias and in many cases across the country, junk science in forensic science. It’s just a horrible confluence, a perfect storm of all these factors that lead to wrongful conviction.”
Malkin noted the news media’s “social justice” methodology in selecting which examples of wrongful convictions to ignore. “There are certain targets of wrongful convictions that can get more press attention than others,” she said. “There’s a social justice aspect to the publicity lottery where, for example, left-wing celebrities can behind some of these cases but not others. In particular, police officers who’ve been railroaded by their own colleagues, a lot of whom have been intimidated, there’s a code of silence, the people will lose their jobs if they blow the whistle.”
Malkin said many prosecutors “wield unlimited amounts of power” and “are not interested in pursuing the truth or justice but in getting reelected or in gaining even more power.” Nefarious prosecutors are common, she added. “We’ve seen that narrative play out at the federal level. … If you’re outraged by what Robert Mueller is doing in the swamp, it’s happening in your own backyard. I can guarantee it . There is a tyrannical district attorney in your country or an attorney general.”
Malkin continued, “There have been 2000 exonerations since the University of Michigan Law School started keeping count in the early 1980s of people who have been able to clear their names. The average amount of time it takes to clear a name is 12 years, but it’s much more likely that people will spend, as the subject of my documentary, 20 or 21 years [in jail]. … My eyes have been completely opened about how a man’s life can be destroyed by this confluence of a media that are lap dogs for a police state as well as shoddy investigators who don’t know how to do their jobs coupled with forensic science that is still back in the 1900s instead of 2018.”
Malkin praised the Innocence Project, founded by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck. The Innocence Project lists its mission statement as “exonerat[ing] the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reform[ing] the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.”
Malkin concluded, “I will never disagree that in America we have the best criminal justice system in the world, but it is not perfect, and we need to rectify the situation for people who are wronged, and we need prosecutors to pay a price when they do wrong knowingly, and that means some kind of accountability. I think a lot of these prosecutors should have to serve the sentences that were meted out to innocent people.”
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