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I've been wishing something like this would happen for a while. Someone to mention prisoners getting tested upon and such! If it weren't something called the Constitution, I'd be all for it! Oh yeah., Innocent rabbits, dogs, cats, and monkeys are being tortured with AIDS, cancer, and mascara for what? They aren't human, they won't react the same way. Their life expectancies are not the same. And unfortunatley the testing needs to be done. Please take our prisoners! The ones on death row. If I'm going to house and feed them for years, they may as well be put to good use. It's not like college education is really going to do anything for one who will be dying anyway. Imagine all the money's saved to the pharmesutical companies for buying lab animals. Imagine all the money saved on food and shelter or prisoners. Well, they do have to disect them to find out how things reacted in the body! I dunno, I think it's a cost affective way of killing two birds with one stone.

I've give a great chunk of my time to innocence projects and am appalled at the high numbers of innocent people who are incarcerated. I'm referring to cases where prisoners were found to be innocent based on hard evidence.

States are currently moving for moratoriums on the death penalty, because, in the cases that have been reviewed, at least 30% of death row inmates were exonerated (innocent).
That percentage does include the ones that were already put to death and since found to be innocent.

It is my experience that those who are sentenced to life in prison or death row do not have access to any rehabilitation or education programs.

While taking Criminal Justice coursework at Louisiana State University, I attended classes with a young woman whose father was exonerated and freed from a life sentence in Angola State Prison.

Calvin Willis was freed, after serving 22 years of a life sentence, after it was discovered that the prosecuting attorney's office had been in possession of evidence that would prove conclusively that he was innocent.

Our legal system provides for 16 years of appeals in the case of a death penalty. If Calvin Willis's conviction had been a death penalty, he would have been put to death before his innocence had been uncovered.


It is a crime for any prosecutor to withhold evidence that proves that the suspect or convicted person is innocent. But no prosecutor has ever been prosecuted for this offense.

The prosecutor in Calvin Willis's case, Harry Connick, Sr., father of singer Harry Connick, Jr., was responsible for a substantial number of false convictions based upon prosecutorial misconduct. Connick was prosecutor of Orleans Parrish, Louisiana, since 1974, after 29 years, and prosecuted more than 7500 cases during his career. He retired at the age of 76, but only after many cases came to light that revealed he had intentionally withheld exonerating evidence and wrongly convicted people whom he knew were innocent.

In Calvin Willis's case, which is exemplary of many wrongful convictions, wthe conviction was primarily the result of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel. Upon Calvin Willis's release from prison, Harry Connick retried him an additional five times, at great cost to the public, in an effort to save face.

The prosecutor's office has repeatedly refused to pursue the real rapist in the case, despite the fact that there is DNA evidence and police reports that all point to one particular perpetrator, who is still free to continue committing similar heinous crimes.

Calvin Willis was freed from prison after serving 22 years of a life sentence, unable to read (because he was excluded from educational programs) and without any restitution for having served 22 years of a wrongful conviction.
He is now a speaker for The Innocence Project, raising funds for other inmates to have their cases reviewed.

http://innocenceproject.org/case/dis...ile.php?id=138

Most people who are wrongfully convicted of crimes are minorities and/or unable to afford an efficient lawyer. But as long as such injustices continue, we are all subject to becoming the victims of wrongful conviction.

Our Constitution was set up to provide safeguards for our basic civil rights.
The U.S. Constitution was devised to protect our citizens from the abuses of law enforcement as carried out by the ruling class of Great Britain.

A citizen should not lose their rights just because they become incarcerated.


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Even though it looks good on paper to test on prisoners, there are just too many things that are wrong with it (including Constitutional and moral grounds).

Human testing was done by the Nazis and Japanese back in the dark days of World War II, on their prisoners (of war or otherwise).

That is another reason why human testing (even on prisoners) gets a big thumbs-down.

VERY EXCELLENT POINT!

and very well put!

Are we talking about the tests in the UK???

I was thinking of putting myself forward for this.

I think we have to look at the bigger picture here - these tests are on-going all the time - hundreds in progress every week all over the world.

I'm no bio-chemist but advances in medicine are a good thing. Unfortunately human testing is needed for any true progress to be made.

Sure, the people that are ill are all young - but they knew there was a very small risk that this could happen. In return, you get paid very well - upward of USD 1,000 a week for some clinical trials.

This is a very unfortunate episode - but the show has to go on. There are so many uncurable diseases out there which results in even more unecessary deaths every year.

I'm not against human drug trials.
I realize that it may be a necessary evil in some cases, but let it be done voluntarily and let the volunteers be compensated for their risk for the better good.
I am against forced drug testing of any kind and depriving people of their basic human rights for just the sort of reason Golden Eye stated.


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It is true alot of people incarcerated are found innocent. But I think the majority are guilty. Do we not jail anyone, because we are not "sure". And what of their time lost sitting in a prison cell? At least that time can be put to good use. I think it is a great deterant for crimes. Imagine, if you get caught doing something that is a capital offense and get caught, you can actually do something good for someone else, ie. a cure. The benefits outweight the risk of jailing innocent people. And we are talking a limited number as well, compared to those that are in jail for a short period vs those on death row. We shame ourselves when we let out criminals early because we have no room for them. To put them back out on the street to reoffend is just insulting. It's like asking them to commit a crime again. And honestly, most get so used to the prison life when they get out, they do want to reoffend just as to go back to the safty and leisure of a cell. I understand about protecting innocent lives, but the guilty vs. the innocent are outweighted. And something needs to be done with them insted of coddling them with cable tv, college education, and weights.

No one hates watching the courts put guilty people back out on the streets more than I do, because I get to pick up the pieces after them.



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Volunteer human trials are not exactly fair, no matter how well people are compensated monetarily. They will rely primarily on human destitution and desperation, if not greed.

As for tes