Recently, Oprah Winfrey hosted Martin Tankleff on her TV program. He related his nightmarish experience, spending 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. For years there had been reports about the crime – with third parties identifying the real killers of Tankleff’s mother and father. To the end, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Suffolk County District Attorney fought his release.

On that same Oprah program, a young California man told of being held for a year in prison until DNA revealed another man had killed his sister. In both cases, the falsely imprisoned men had confessed after being tortured. There is no other way to describe how they were forced into signing confessions. Both were teenagers at the time.

In recent years, the Innocence Project has exposed numerous cases in which false confessions resulted in gross injustice. The off-Broadway play “The Exonerated” gave dramatic testimony about lives ruined by careless and sometimes sinister prosecutions. John Grisham’s book “The Appeal” is further testimony of courtroom abuses.

Nearly 40 years ago I met a young man named George Whitmore who had been released from prison after serving two years. He had to do time because he was an embarrassment to the Manhattan D.A. Whitmore had been picked up on a Brooklyn street for attempted robbery. Before the cops were finished with him, he had confessed to the murders of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie. Their deaths had been Page 1 news for days. The killing of two white girls living on Manhattan’s eastside prompted political pressure on the DA and the police.

The only problem with Whitmore’s confession was that co-workers in Wildwood, New Jersey recalled watching Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream Speech” on TV with young Whitmore the day of the Wylie-Hoffert murders.

The streets were wild with rumors but the Manhattan DA was not going to cut Whitmore loose until he had another suspect. An East Harlem drug dealer poked a rival in the head with an ice pick. After he was arrested, he told the police that he could identify the real Wylie-Hoffert killer. So desperate were they for a conclusion to that case, the ice pick killer was able to make a deal and was never arraigned. The city then had two accused killers: George Whitmore and Richie Robles.

Robles received double life and his accuser, a self-confessed murderer, walked. George Whitmore had the wrath of the DA. And his initial case which should have prompted probation ended up with him in state prison. That’s when I began to see how the wheels of justice would spin.

The opening of Michael Connelly’s new novel “The Brass Verdict” begins…“Everyone lies. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victim lies. A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.”

Such cynicism might be viewed as un-American. Much more cynical has been the realization that during the last eight years, the leaders of our country, at the highest level, have condoned and encouraged torture as a means of gaining information. They have legitimized the abuses that have been the curse of our criminal justice system.

Torture, it has been proven, prompts false information and innocent people to plead guilty, and guilty people to go undetected. If the President, Vice President and Attorney General of the United States defend the use of torture, they have legitimatized every police-station abuse.

Read the stories of false imprisonment…men and women being released after years of unjust incarceration. The newspapers and television news shows always run these features…personal profiles of the falsely imprisoned, but NEVER do they hold accountable the myriad forces that allow this to happen: district attorneys, corrupt or inadequate defense attorneys, police officers pressured to get confessions, politicians who maneuver careers and newspapers who never challenge the abuses.

The courtroom is not about seeking truth but moving the agenda…and lives and justice fall by the wayside. Who are the people responsible for Martin Tankleff’s “confession” and for withholding evidence and information that was put forth years before his release? Such persons must be held accountable. Either we are not a nation of laws and justice…or our democracy has been betrayed.

I’m David Rothenberg…out on a limb.