‘Caste legal system: In US you only get as much justice as you can afford’ (Source rt.com) Racism and class prejudice permeate every step of the US criminal justice system, says Paul Wright, executive director of Human Rights Defense Center, adding that there’s no real intention among the ruling power to overcome the disparity. African Americans are more likely to be wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn’t commit than their white counterparts, according to a “Race and Wrongful Convictions” study that was released earlier this week. “African Americans are only 13 percent of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47 percent of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in ‘group exonerations,’” the  HYPERLINK “https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf” \t “_blank” report reads. RT America’s Manila Chan discussed the findings of the report with Paul Wright, executive director of Human Rights Defense Center, and editor of monthly American magazine Prison Legal News. He said the only thing that he thought was surprising is that the numbers weren’t higher.“It’s one of those things where it’s fair to say that racism and classism permeate every step of the criminal justice system in the US. That starts off with who is policing in the first place and to who gets arrested, who gets tried, convicted and sentenced,” Wright said.