Walter Ogrod was just set free after spending 3 decades on death row. The reason he was there in the first place underscores everything that is wrong with the justice system.
In July of 1988, a 4 year old girl named Barbara Jean went missing in Philadelphia. Her body was found wrapped in a garbage bag inside of a TV box, about 1000 feet from her home.
4 yrs later, Philly police arrested one of her neighbors, Walter, charged him with sexual assault & murder, & forced him to confess. While he was in jail, they enticed jailhouse informants to fabricate statements against him in exchange for immunity from charge for their cases.
Let me repeat that: the police got people in jail to lie about an innocent man, in exchange for letting them free from things they were possibly guilty of doing.
Walter's "confession" was riddled with errors that didn't line up with the facts of the case. For one thing, his "confession" was that he beat her to death, but she died from asphyxiation.
During the trial, prosecutors withheld exonerating evidence from the defense, which at this point is something we've all become used to hearing, even though it's illegal.
There was, of course, zero physical evidence.
The prosecution's case was so terrible that Walter's first trial ended in a mistrial. Even still, they were able to successfully convict him in 1996, and he was sentenced to death.
The Philadelphia DA and police were more concerned about pinning Barbara's death on someone, anyone, than they were about doing the harder work of actually finding the person who raped and murdered her.
Let's recap: the people in charge of protecting the people of Philadelphia focused their efforts on framing an innocent man, and even setting other suspects free in exchange for lying about him, rather than trying to find a rapist & murderer who may still be walking the streets.
Thankfully, even though it took nearly 30 years, a Philadelphia judge finally set Walter free, and the DA's office is filing to refuse to retry him.
Unfortunately, many other people have been executed despite similarly terrible cases against them, including Nathaniel Woods earlier this year.
.@Jorgensen4POTUS & I are staunchly opposed to the death penalty, because when gov't is given power, they often use it in the most cynical, abusive, inequitable ways. The death penalty gives gov't power to decide who lives and dies, & we see what giving them that power leads to.
Thankfully for Walter, after losing over half of his life on death row, he is home with his loved ones.
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