Another Reason to Respect Ken Cuccinelli

Ken Cuccinelli really believes the law is about justice, so when new DNA evidence showed another man committed the crime that jailed Thomas Haynesworth, he went to bat for the imprisoned man. Read the excerpt from the Washington Times article below and click on the headline for the full story. It's well worth your time.

Keene: Justice delayed shouldn’t be justice denied
Exoneration of the innocent is a paramount act of conscience

Last week, the mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (exonerate.org) hosted a lunch to honor two very different men. One is black. The other is white. One has served 27 years in Virginia prisons for crimes he didn’t commit. The other is Virginia’s chief law enforcement official.

Their story began one evening in 1984, when 18-year-old Thomas Haynesworth went to a Richmond store to buy sweet potatoes for his mother. He’d never been in trouble, but as he left the store, a rape victim spotted him, called the police and mistakenly identified him as her attacker. Mr. Haynesworth was quickly arrested, jailed, tried, convicted of raping three women, sentenced to 84 years, hustled off to a state penitentiary and promptly forgotten....


Fortunately for Mr. Haynesworth, Mr. Cuccinelli is one attorney general who believes that while our criminal justice system works pretty well most of the time, it isn’t perfect. “We have to remember” he told his audience last week, “it was designed by human beings and is staffed by human beings, who sometimes make mistakes.” This simple and obvious fact, he argues, means those working within the system have an obligation to keep in mind the possibility that mistakes might be made and do all they can to rectify them when they occur.