Episode 7. The Stephen Poaches story

I met Stephen Poaches several years ago in the law library at a prison in Pennsylvania. Like most people in prison, he said that he was innocent. My response was always, "I can't believe you're innocent until I see it for myself (It just didn't seem likely that all of these people professing their innocents' was true after going through our judicial process - of course, later I learned how flawed our judicial process is, and that there are too many innocent people incarcerated to do nothing about it. He allowed me to read through his court papers and I did find it interesting that things the district attorney had said, and the media, didn't match up to what was on his arrest papers. Then I read that his guilt was established by his words that were spoken after being held in an interrogation room for nearly two days, without food or water and the light was left on. I had spent time in a cell under those same conditions, and it does something to your mental health. In fact, I still feel that I have trauma from that. Stephen told me that he was put on a medication called "Thorazine," which is a common medication prescribed in county jails and State prisons. They prescribe it to pacify us so that we don't act out. If you're familiar with the medication then you know that you cannot make any rational decisions while on it. I read enough of his court papers to conclude that he should be entitled to a new, and fair trial. In Pennsylvania, as many other States, there is a time limit on appealing, and Stephen is beyond that limit. People should have an opportunity to appeal regardless of any time-limitation. If there is a posibility that you're innocent what does a clock matter. So many people in our prisons have been found to be innocent many years later. Now that we know that it's a posibility, shouldn't we allow anyone the ability to appeal, even those that didn't know how, or had the money for an attorney. Thomas Jefferson stated at the inception of the composition of our Constitutional rights that he would rather see 100 guilty people go free than 1 innocent person go to jail. He and the composers of our judicial system had confidence that our courts would protect our rights. we know that has been lost now for many years. It's time we fix this, and it's time we give these men and woman a platform to speak, to let us know what happened to them.----I don't mean to resurrect emotions for the family and loved ones of the woman and her unborn child who was killed. I do believe though, I would want to be certain that the person being punished is the right person, and that the person who did this doesn't do it to anyone else. It is also interesting to note, that this was the first case that the FBI used celluar-phone data to pin point a persons location.