GUEST: David McCallum, who was falsely convicted of murder at 16 and spent the next 29 years in prison, talks about his eventual exoneration, the role of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, and the shame of our racist criminal justice system.
I don't know how a society can tolerate what happened to David McCallum and so many other Black teenagers who where unjustly sent to prison by white prosecutors and detectives.
How can people in authority knowingly sacrifice Black youths in order to advance their own careers? Talk about "super predators," as Hillary called African American young people caught up in the criminal justice system.
The tactics of Detective Joseph Butta of Brooklyn from the website Ken Klonsky Outing the Law.
Steve Drizin at the Bluhm Legal Clinic (Northwestern University), one of McCallum’s supporters, uses the term ‘fed fact’ to elucidate this phenomenon. An unscrupulous or severely deluded police detective can plant details into a suspect’s confession if the suspect’s concerns about a conviction are minimized. Hence both Willie and David ‘confessed’ because each thought that the other was going to prison for the murder. Detective Butta must also have told Stuckey and McCallum that they needed specific details in their confessions to make them believable. In a sense, they thought they were in a competition to become a witness as opposed to a murderer. So Butta supplied the details from what he had already learned about the events surrounding the crime. Either he thought that he had the real culprits and wanted to solidify a case with no evidence or he needed these two boys to substitute for the real culprits. McCallum and Stuckey, during their trial, both claimed that Butta had slapped them and effectively intimidated them. McCallum also claimed that Butta held up a chair and threatened to hit him over the head if he didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. Under duress and handcuffed with no recording of the interrogation, the two boys swallowed the fed facts. They confessed on video because each thought that they would be going home.
David talked about the protections for district attorneys and detectives who pray upon innocent people to gain notoriety and political power. Former district attorney Charles J. Hynes is one example. His replacement, Kenneth Thompson, had the last word:
I inherited a legacy of disgrace with regards to wrongful conviction cases.Why isn't Charles Hynes in prison? The color of his skin? The absolute corruption of our criminal justice system?
