How Eyewitnesses Can Send Innocents to Jail
When he recently signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn noted a "grave danger" that the innocent could be executed. This past March, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in Skinner v. Switzer, to expand the right to access DNA testing that could potentially prove a defendant's innocence. Last week the New York Times published a firsthand account by John Thompson, an innocent man who came within hours of his own execution. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a $14 million jury award compensating him for the years he spent in prison. Public opinion surrounding the death penalty has been shaped, in recent years, by the possibility of innocents being executed. And DNA exonerations continue to regularly occur, although with little rigorous assessment of what went wrong.
In my new book, Convicting the Innocent, I conducted the first empirical study of the first 250 wrongful convictions brought to light by DNA tests in the United States. First, I located the original criminal trial materials from almost all of those innocent people's cases. I then reviewed those remarkable cases. My goal in revisiting those trials was to try to understand how the criminal justice system could make such fundamental errors. These 250 cases shed light on how not just death penalty cases (17 of the 250 were capital cases), but everyday criminal cases rely on unsound evidence and faulty investigative procedures. It's easy to blame innocent convictions on occasional human error. The high court suggested as much in its ruling in Osborne v. District Attorney's Office, denying an inmate's request for post-conviction DNA testing and saying that our criminal justice system, "like any human endeavor, cannot be perfect." But just because a system is a human one doesn't mean that we should casually assume that things must go wrong. My research shows systemic failures that can be prevented by using improved criminal procedures, subject of a multimedia website, a joint project with the Innocence Project, titled "Getting it Right,"to be launched soon, and with a segment on eyewitness misidentifications which has just been launched.
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