Does the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard help or hinder the pursuit of justice?

I politely listened as Dinedra Smith told me her brother, Jamar Huggins, had been unfairly prosecuted. We were in a conference room in The Sun News building with Kia Gagum, Huggins’s girlfriend.

They told me about an armed home invasion in Conway, provided copies of court and police documents and detailed the ways they believed his case had gone wrong.

At the end of that hour-long conversation, I thanked them, said I might take a look.

Frankly, I didn’t expect anything to come of it. I get calls about criminal justice unfairness weekly, including letters from prisoners declaring their innocence. Most of those I have had time to follow up led to the same conclusion: there was nothing wrong with the conviction; there was reason to believe something was (possibly) untoward but there was no way to know with any reasonable level of certainty; or that the case was too singular to use as a proxy for an examination of the system itself.

That’s where I expected the Huggins case to remain. I didn’t begin investigating it until I received an official transcript of the trial — about five months after my initial meeting with Smith and Gagum.

It then became clear the case could raise public awareness about how easy it is to have your life forever altered based on nearly no evidence even though we have a “beyond a reasonable doubt” system purportedly in favor of the defendant when guilt isn’t overwhelmingly clear.

And it highlights the sometimes distorting role legally protected lying by police officers can have on an investigation.

The Huggins case raises questions about the process we use to determine who should go to prison, who shouldn’t, and why.

Contact Issac J. Bailey at @ijbailey via Twitter.com.

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 3:10 PM with the headline "Does the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard help or hinder the pursuit of justice?."