Rise and Reform

Recently, I came across an Instagram account dedicated to proving the innocence of Derek Martinez, a man convicted of murder over 20 years ago. After reading through their website, I learned that his conviction rested on a confession from his ex-wife. In 2019, she stated that she no longer believes what she said reflected real events. Despite her recanting her testimony, Derek still remains in prison. 

I found this information online when looking at The People’s Commission for Integrity in Criminal Justice. After looking through their website, I noticed they have reported on six other cases similar to Derek’s. That is seven cases of people wrongly accused of a crime, and who are now suffering abuse in the prison system because of it. 

As I’ve talked about on this blog several times, prison is inhumane. It is abuse and neglect. Even when a person has actually committed a crime, it does not offer any positive impact on our society, the person who committed the crime, or the other people that crime has impacted. 

I talked a little bit about this in my post about the documentary When a Witness Recants. If our legal system wasn’t built on punishing people who we believe to have committed crimes, we wouldn’t constantly be sending innocent people into prison to be abused as well. What we are going to see (and what we have already been seeing) is a lot of people coming out the other end, traumatized and lacking the skillset and tools to cope with what they’ve been through. Sending people, innocent or guilty, into a system that knowingly increases the recidivism rate doesn’t benefit anyone. 

So what can we do about this? 

Well, you can go to this website to sign the petition for Derek’s clemency*. You can also follow their campaign on Instagram here. Engaging with their posts either through liking, commenting, sharing/reposting or even just hitting the “copy link” button is a great way to push their content and get the word out to other people. 

Together, we can get Derek out of prison and into the mental health support he needs to cope with the trauma and abuse that has been inflicted on him. We cannot keep letting innocent people suffer this kind of abuse. 

Our legal system needs to do better. Doug Ford needs to do better. Mark Carney needs to do better. I am truly so disappointed that we keep letting this happen. We have sent innocent people into the prison system to be abused enough times that we should be able to learn from our mistakes. 

If you would like to read more about prison reform and inmate rehabilitation, please hit the subscribe button.

*Clemency is a legal term I haven’t used in my blog before. Because of that, I have added it to my list of definitions. You can find that post here.