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In June, Mitchell says a Superior Court judge in Charlotte jailed her for fourteen days after holding her in contempt when she challenged the truthfulness of a Sheriff's Office employee during cross-examination.
At that trial, Mitchell had represented herself because that judge declined to provide the indigent woman with a court-appointed attorney. That Sheriff's employee initiated charges against Mitchell claiming, according to an official report, that Mitchell starred at her "like she wanted to kill me" weeks after that employee was disciplined for failing to properly process legal paperwork paid for by Mitchell.
"I have a legal right to confront my accuser but I get sent to jail. This is wrong," Mitchell said in an interview with TCBH.
"In March, a judge sent me to jail for 48-hours for not swearing on the Bible. Judges put me in jail for seventy days last fall because I objected to unlawful abuses," said Mitchell, who has filed formal complaints against three Charlotte judges, including the jurist during that June trial.
All six persons released from Pennsylvania's death row after being found innocent on appeal, often after years awaiting execution were victimized by authorities who knowingly ignored and/or even hid compelling evidence of their innocence.
One of those exonerated, Neil Ferber, successfully sued Philadelphia police for the false arrest that placed him on death row for 1,375-days, where he developed ulcers and endured a nervous breakdown. Police arrested Ferber in 1981 on a charge of murdering an organized crime figure.
A judge's written opinion in Ferber's civil lawsuit, which was settled for $1.9-million, stated how "a variety of Philadelphia police officers" had engaged in a litany of illegal conduct "all for the singular purpose of obtaining Ferber's arrest and subsequent conviction""
False arrests constitute an expensive, corrosive rot in the criminal justice system that elected officials ignore largely because many of them fear being labeled "soft on crime" an ironic stance since false arrests end up being soft-on-criminals by allowing the real culprits to remain at-large.
A proposal in the "Contract With America" released recently by the GOP would make it much easier to succeed with false arrests by permitting police to utilize illegally seized evidence in courts.
Incredibly, many false arrests are simply the result of the venal police practice of trying to pad their pay checks with overtime for making court appearances. Those NYC cops who framed the Colon brothers, for example, were just angling to collect overtime, according to the two men's lawyer.
The false arrest of Kenneth Woods is all too typical in exhibiting overzealous police work to quickly solve a horrific crime, false statements by police, and the pervasive rights-sabotaging, guilty-till-proven-innocent mentality that prevails among authorities in America's "justice" system.
While typical, several elements of Woods' encounter with law enforcement were startlingly atypical.
First off, Woods had an "avenging angel' in Robert Herdelin, a wealthy businessman who had once employed Woods' grandmother. Had Herdelin not swung into action on his behalf, Woods would probably still be in prison awaiting trial for crimes he didn't commit. Police had dismissed his pleas of innocence and ignored his alibi witnesses, who offered to take lie-detector tests.
Herdelin, after the young man's arrest, began his own investigation, interviewing witnesses and ultimately identifying the real culprit--in other words he did the due diligence and legwork that police detectives should have done in the case. He also offered to post his multi-million-dollar Jersey shore home as collateral for Woods' release on bail. Authorities were holding Woods on $1-million dollars bail.
Herdelin's efforts forced detectives to reexamine their case against Woods, who Herdelin calls his "god-son."
After Herdelin's intervention, authorities tap-danced away from declaring that cell phone photo was Woods who told police that the cell phone recovered from the stolen SUV was not his. The confessed culprit, Donny Sayers, admitted that the cell phone belonged to him and he had left it in the SUV when he fled following the fatal crash.
