What kind of world do we live in?
That was my thought when I heard how Sharon Snyder got fired for doing right.
The 70-year-old worked in a Kansas, Missouri, court for over three decades. She was fired for providing a public — public — document showing how an inmate could successfully request DNA testing.
Twenty-seven years ago, Robert Nelson was convicted of rape. Nelson was no angel back then. He was also sentenced for robbery; the sentence for rape would begin after he had served the time for robbery.
When his sister appealed to Snyder in 2011, Nelson had filed two previous requests for DNA testing, both denied. Snyder gave her a copy of a motion that had worked in a different case. It worked again. A crime lab determined that Nelson’s DNA was not that found at the crime scene.
He was released with decades left to serve on the rape charge.
Then the judge who had denied Nelson’s first two motions, David Byrne, fired Sharon Synder for violating court rules. Whatever validity those rules may sometimes have, they were wrongly applied here.
We live in a world where persons like Byrne feel justified in firing a woman for helping a wrongly convicted man escape many years of unjust imprisonment. That makes me angry. But — it is also a world in which Sharon Snyder acted to save that man from suffering any more of that unjust prison time. Thank you, Sharon Snyder.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Innocent”
Ms. Snyder is an American hero.
Judge Byrne is a despot. Any chance he will have to run for re-election?
Byrne is yet another example of a government employee who doesn’t like it when others in government actually help citizens. Reading the link, we find that the prosecutor and defense attorney had a problem with what she did. Why would the defense attorney have a problem with her help in getting an innocent man release?
Unfortunately, many in the court system see their job as justifying their decisions, rather than administering justice. Byrne, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney should be disbarred IMHO. That would be justice considering what they did.
We now live in a NON-Christian world, because Christianity is SO uncool and people prefer the religion of Liberalism. In this world of Liberalism, there is no blind justice, a Christian concept. There is only justice that makes the person administering it FEEL better. Food Justice, Social Justice, black on white (or white hispanic) justice.…those are the COOL justices. Theft, covetness, adultery, murder, etc., are all okay as long as the perpetrator otherwise conforms to Liberal Orthodoxy. That is the world we are now in. Be afraid, if you disagree with a Liberal. Be VERY afraid.
Thank you, Sharon.