Derrick Deacon just got released from prison in New York, after serving almost twenty-five years behind bars for a murder he did not commit. After new testimony and new evidence surfaced, Deacon was granted a new trial. It took a jury all of nine minutes to find Deacon "Not Guilty" with the new evidence. Congratulations to Derrick Deacon for standing up for himself all these years, but why did he get convicted in the first place? It seems that the district attorney's office in Kings county, New York, didn't have the balls to go after a gang member who shot a teenager during a robbery, so police arrested a homeless man, Deacon, instead. A young woman by the name of Colleen Campbell saw the actual killer, and told law enforcement. While she did not know the identity of the actual killer, she knew who Deacon was, and that he did not commit the murder. This should have been sufficient, in the absence of any other evidence, to rule Deacon out. but not so fast......gangs are dangerous and notorious for vengeance, and homeless people do not put up much of a fight when coerced and pushed around, and Kings County needed a conviction, right? A homeless man is much safer to victimize than a gang member, so the prosecutor saw to it that Deacon was arrested and prosecuted for the crime, instead of the guilty party. When Campbell didn't want to convict an innocent man, investigators and prosecutors threatened to have her children removed from her home! "Deacon's case raises troubling questions about how he was convicted in the first place. The Village Voice reports that Deacon was convicted after investigators coerced a witness named Colleen Campbell, who knew he hadn't commited the crime.
At Deacon's retrial, Campbell said authorities had threatened to take her kids away if she testified that she knew Deacon wasn't the killer, according to the Village Voice. Another witness testified that Deacon did commit the shooting, which was enough to convict him."......Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo News.
Since when does testifying in court, or not testifying in court, or telling the truth, for that matter.....equal child abuse or child neglect? This stunt of threatening the children of witnesses in order to gain untruthful testimony seems to be a prosecutor's ace in the hole, these days! Is this the true role of Child Protective Services, assisting prosecutors in the attainment of wrongful convictions by threatening to hold hostage the children of witnesses? That might help explain why caseloads are bursting at the seams, and why Child Protective Services isn't always available to the child who actually needs them! Taxpayers are forced to pay them to enforce the whims of crooked court officials! Sad, but apparently true.
Twenty-five years of an innocent man's life.
