The United States legal and criminal justice system suffers from systemic racism and injustice where the police and courts are funded by fraudulent charges against innocent people, a researcher and historian in Washington says.
Dr. Randy Short made the comments in an interview with Press TV following a new report that criminal exonerations in the United States hit a record high last year due to wrongful convictions and an unjust legal system.
A record 149 people were exonerated in 2015, nearly three a week, the National Registry of Exonerations said Wednesday.
A record 58 exonerated defendants had been convicted of homicide, including five people who had been sentenced to death, according to the report.
“The recent findings that so many incarcerated Americans are in fact falsely arrested, falsely accused, convicted and they’re being exonerated is just a drop in the bucket of the systemic structural racism and injustice that is part and parcel and integral to the American system,” Dr. Short said Friday.
“Whether it’s the justice system, the economic system or the political system,” he noted. “The end of the (US) Civil War brought about a new form of slavery that could be implemented through convictions of persons.”
“The police departments and cities are finance by fraudulent, fictitious and chumped up charges [and] high bails,” Dr. Short said. “Our prisons are based on a for-profit system.”
The report on exonerations comes at a time of heightened scrutiny on the US law enforcement and criminal justice system.
In the past few years there have been high-profile cases involving police misconduct, especially against African-Americans.
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