Picture this. A young man falls into poverty and, out of desperation, resorts to petty theft in order to help feed his family. He gets caught and is sentenced to a few months in prison as punishment for committing a Class B misdemeanor.
Joaquin Ciria spent thirty-two years imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. And while there is plenty of blame to go around since police pressured an accomplice to implicate Ciria and prosecutors offered an accomplice immunity to testify against Ciria, at least part of the reason he lost three decades of his life was that his defense attorney did not provide effective assistance of counsel.
