Convictions at all costs

Regarding “In the pursuit of justice” (August 8), Greer Fay Cashman draws attention to a subject of great importance.

The instances she quotes of the egregious miscarriage of justice back up the assertion of Prof. Boaz Sangero, the founder of the criminal law and criminology department of Ramat Gan College of Law and business, that there are approximately 2,000 innocent people languishing in Israeli prisons, because psychological and/or physical force were used to extract confessions.

One expects to find this kind of situation only in the worst type of repressive dictatorships, not in a country that claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, and which is supposed to strive to be a light onto the nations.

The primary concern of those responsible in the Israeli justice system for issuing indictments should be to bring the guilty to justice. The evidence clearly indicates that, instead of acting in the spirit of the biblical injunction “that which is altogether just shalt thou follow,” at least some are motivated by a desire to obtain convictions at all costs, whether the convicted person is the guilty party being only a secondary consideration. By following this policy, they inflate their record of convictions and enhance their prospects of promotion. These members of the police and the justice system are themselves guilty of the crime of incarcerating people who have committed no crime.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has been in office since 2015. She has had plenty of time to realize the existence of the situation described above but has done nothing. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and at least as far as justice in this country is concerned, we are in desperate times. Therefore, painful as it may be, there is only one way to right this situation: all those motivated by a desire to obtain convictions at all costs must be replaced by those who believe in the above biblical injunction.

GERRY MYERS Beit Zayit