Link from the Marshall Project:
HereIt's a long read, but a riveting one. Regardless of whether the person is guilty or not, what struck me was the huge personal and financial liability that Sara had to go through just to put together a case to Los Angeles County's Conviction Review Unit. She and her husband have undoubted spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a defense team and private investigator, and still ended up doing a lot of the work herself because of her research skills. Then there's the mental toll of being the point person in those case and believing (whether rightly or wrongly) that she was being targeted because of her focus on this, to the point where she's barely able to function.
I admire her that she seems to have gone through it all because she felt it was the right thing to do, but I also wonder if this is a case where she would have been better off caring for herself first so she could better take care of others. I also wonder if in an oligarchical capitalist system she would have been better off devoting her research talents on finding a wealthier benefactor to take the case...the article mentioned that she occasionally corresponded with Jeff Bezos, who is currently worth $183.9 billion according to Wikipedia. It's an interest that Kim Kardashian has picked up on in recent years, most visibly when she was involved in former President Trump's commutation of Alice Johnson.
Of course, the fact that prison and criminal justice reform seems to require wealthy celebrities to get action done says a lot about the system, doesn't it? But being what it is, they probably could have done more with it than a relatively obscure author who is certainly not wealthy.
And then there's the system itself...is the core issue that the criminal justice system is too big? It seems to me that many of the current issues with the system could be attributed it being too big...having too many people involved...a monolithic system where perhaps in some parts getting convictions and perpetrating the image of justice is more important than actually doing justice. A rot of optics that seems to have infected a large portion of our society...where looking good is more important than doing good.
All I know is that this is not a situation that should happen in the wealthiest country on earth. It should not be this hard or perilous to bring what appears to be a perfectly reasonable case to the right people.
