There was no physical evidence that Brian had committed the crime, and prosecutors offered Banks the standard game of “Lifetime Roulette,” where an innocent man is told that asking for a fair trial means that he is gambling with his life.
Had Banks fought the case and put his fate in the hands of a (probably all-white) jury, he was threatened with up to 41 years. That makes a plea bargain look good to anyone, even a man who is entirely innocent. (source)
Gibson’s false accusation sent Banks to prison for five years, stripping him of his football scholarship to the University of Southern California. (source)Guess how much Banks received?
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Friday ordered Wanetta Gibson to pay $2.6 million to the court. (source)
So why did she do it? To sue the school. She nearly ruined someone's life so that she could falsely claim the school was not safe.Had the plea bargain gone through, as they usually do, he would end up his days being raped because of a woman who saw him as nothing but a meal ticket, a chance to be wealthy. Not as a fellow human being... less than a dog, even.
He was disposable.
Had he not been able to hire detectives to uncover her crime, he might never have seen freedom, or the ability to work, or marry. Had he lived to see release, he would have been labelled and vilified as a sex criminal, a rapist, unsafe, unclean.
Now he is rebuilding his life.
Banks has become a spokesman for the California Innocence Project, which works to exonerate the wrongly accused.
How many others are not so lucky?
No comments:
Post a Comment