Imagine losing 10 years of your life in a Colorado prison. Imagine suffering that terrible existence knowing you were innocent of the crime for which you’d been convicted. Imagine losing all those years because a prosecutor withheld evidence from your lawyers that might have exonerated you. Then imagine how we’d all feel if this person had been executed for the crime he did not commit.
The case of Tim Masters makes me shudder. He was accused of murdering a Fort Collins woman when he was 15. Later, he was convicted of that crime because of his violent teenage writings and pictures. But important evidence was withheld from the judge and the jury.
Now, DNA evidence has shown he was not the killer. I’m sure Masters is thrilled to be free. But that doesn’t bring back 10 years of his life, 10 years when he could have gone to college, started a career, married and had children. It doesn’t relieve the prosecutors of their unconscionable dereliction of duty, withholding evidence that might have kept a terrible injustice from occurring.
Fortunately, there were people who believed Masters was innocent and spent 10 years proving it. But what about others who are also unjustly in prison or even on death row with no one to champion their cause? What about those who may have been executed because no one had DNA evidence to demonstrate their innocence?
For the last several decades, America has gone through a frenzy of self-righteous support for the death penalty. We have seemed to believe that execution evened the scales. When he was running for president, George W. Bush ballyhooed his toughness on crime by telling us how, as Texas governor, he’d approved more than 150 executions. One must wonder how many of those executed might have been proven innocent if DNA evidence had been available.
Recently, we’ve been having second thoughts about the death penalty, based on the number of convicted people who have been proven innocent by DNA testing and by doubts about the humanity of lethal injection, which may be, in reality, excruciatingly painful and cruel.
No one should be imprisoned or executed because of false testimony, incompetent investigators, withheld evidence or inept attorneys. Today, DNA gives us a tool that must always be used to determine guilt or innocence, whatever the cost.
As we reconsider the cases of those wrongly accused and convicted, perhaps it’s time to also re-evaluate whether the death penalty is appropriate in a country that values justice and human rights. If even one innocent person is executed, it is one too many. If we want to demonstrate our own humanity, maybe it’s time to consider other means of punishing violent criminals, besides the spectacle of a nearly public execution.
Tim Masters’ case is a nightmare. Imagine if it were you or your child caught in this web of incompetence and deceit. If Masters hadn’t been 15 years old at the time of the crime that he did not commit, he might have been dead by now, at the hands of the state of Colorado, rather than just the victim of 10 years in a prison cell he should never have occupied.
We Coloradans have some soul-searching to do over our justice system. That’s the very least we can do after the terrible injustice our state has done to Tim Masters.
Gail Schoettler (gailschoettler@email.msn.com) is a former U.S. ambassador and Colorado lieutenant governor. Her column appears twice a month.
