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175 people sent to federal prisons for breaking imaginary laws???

Things could be a lot worse.

According to this article 175 people, and probably a lot more are currently sitting in Federal prisons after being convicted of imaginary crimes.

If you are naive enough to think you will get a fair trial if you are mistakenly arrested for something you didn't do you better read this articles.

In this article 175 people have been convicted of imaginary crimes and sent to prison for those imaginary crimes.

The article also make you wonder how competent the private attorneys people paid to represent them are. Same question for the public defenders that probably represented many of these people for free.

Source

Hundreds of federal prisoners could be freed

By Brad Heath USA Today Wed Dec 26, 2012 10:40 AM

WASHINGTON -- An internal U.S. Justice Department review has identified at least 175 federal prisoners who must be either released or resentenced because they have been kept locked up improperly.

The review, which followed a USA TODAY investigation, found that some of those prisoners should never have been sent to prison because they had not committed a federal crime; others received sentences vastly longer than the law allows.

All of the problems stem from a misunderstanding about which North Carolina state convictions were serious enough to outlaw gun possession or require extended prison sentences under federal law.

The number of prisoners who will ultimately be freed or given shorter sentences is likely to be significantly higher than 175 because the examination by federal prosecutors was confined to the smallest of North Carolina’s three federal court districts. Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said “many more” cases could be upended by the time prosecutors and federal courts resolve them all.

USA TODAY’s investigation in June identified 60 people who were imprisoned even though an appeals court said that what they had done was not a federal crime. Still, USA TODAY found that Justice Department lawyers did almost nothing to notify the prisoners -- many of whom did not know they were innocent -- and asked federal judges to keep them locked up anyway. The Justice Department reversed that position in August.

Since then, federal judges have ordered the government to free at least 32 prisoners, and have taken 12 more off post-prison supervision, court records show. Some had served up to eight years in prison before they were freed.

“That’s a huge number,” said University of San Francisco law professor Richard Leo. He said it is uncommon for any federal convictions to be overturned, let alone for so many to happen in a single episode.

The Justice Department’s examination, completed in September but never made public, is the first estimate of just how big that number could be. Ripley Rand, the U.S. Attorney in Greensboro, N.C., where prosecutors conducted the review, said as many as a third of the gun cases his office prosecuted in recent years could be thrown out. So many prisoners have filed legal cases challenging their convictions that he has assigned three prosecutors to them full time.

Prosecutors in the state’s other two districts did not conduct a similar case-by-case review, and don’t yet know how many of their own cases are in jeopardy. Instead, officials said they are working with defense lawyers to identify cases that should be overturned.

Among those prisoners is Travis Dixon, who was convicted in 2006 of illegally possessing a .44-caliber revolver. Court records show none of his prior state convictions was serious enough to make owning a firearm a federal crime. Justice Department lawyers agree; in September they asked a federal court to overturn his conviction and let Dixon go.

But Dixon is still in federal prison in South Carolina while he waits for a judge to act on the request. “I’m just not understanding why they’re taking this long,” he said in an e-mail.

Another prisoner, Marion Howard, was freed only after he wrote a letter to the judge asking her to “please rule on my case before the holidays” so he could get home to see his family. The judge freed him on Dec. 5.

Federal law bans people from having a gun if they have previously been convicted of a crime that could have put them in prison for more than a year. In North Carolina, however, state law set the maximum punishment for a crime based in part on the criminal record of whoever committed it, meaning some people who committed crimes such as possessing cocaine faced sentences of more than a year, while those with shorter records face only a few months.

For years, federal courts there said that didn’t matter. If someone with a long record could have gone to prison for more than a year, then all who had committed that crime are felons and cannot legally have a gun, the courts maintained. But last year, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said judges had been getting the law wrong, ruling that only people who could have faced more than a year in prison for their crimes qualify as felons.

The decision meant that low-level state convictions should not have been enough to outlaw gun possession or to justify extra-long prison sentences for people who went on to be convicted of federal crimes.

It will take at least a year to untangle all the cases like those, Rand said. His office’s 20 criminal lawyers have been swamped by so many prisoners challenging their sentences that they have been forced to delay some other criminal prosecutions. “It’s definitely been a huge burden,” he said.