Wrongful Convictions

When Terrill Swift came to our school this week to speak with our Issues classes about wrongful convictions, I was blown away by the story he shared. He had been completely tricked and manipulated by the police into signing a confession to a rape and murder he never committed. His rights were violated and he lost fifteen years of his life to the jail sentence and another two due to parole, seventeen years in total were taken from him. His life will never be the same all because the police officers were too lazy and corrupt to find the real rapist and murderer and instead pinned it on an innocent seventeen year old boy. He was taken to the police station without even knowing what he was being arrested for. He was interrogated for hours, being medically and emotionally abused by the authorities until he was completely exhausted. To make matters worse, he was completely lied to by the police when he was told to sign a document that would prove he was innocent of the crime and would be released. The document he signed, however, was saying that he had, in fact, committed the rape and the murder. He suffered for seventeen years, losing his place in the world, losing his ability to communicate with others, and losing his understanding of what it means to be a member of a community. What I found most disturbing from the story that Terrill Swift told us was that the police officers, the people in our community that we are supposed to be able to trust more than anyone, the people that we are supposed to trust with our safety and our lives, might not be looking out for our best interest at all. They put an innocent boy in prison instead of looking for the real criminal. It became clear to me that nobody can be trusted. You always must look at the people around you with some level of speculation. You must always read the fine print and examine the details of a situation. The lessen he said he wanted us to remember most was that we must always be cautious and watch our own backs because putting our trust in the hands of others could cost us everything.