Title : Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: 25 Years of Freeing the Innocent
link : Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: 25 Years of Freeing the Innocent
Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: 25 Years of Freeing the Innocent
The recent Time magazine special edition—“Innocent: The Fight Against Wrongful Convictions”— devoted to “25 years of the Innocence Project,” celebrates what Daniel Medwed, one of the innocence movement’s most prolific scholars and an early “innocence lawyer,” rightly calls the DNA revolution. In its first decade, the embryonic innocence movement was largely occult to the educated public. A drip-drip-drip of news, documentaries, investigative reporting, and popular culture spread knowledge of DNA and non-DNA exonerations to a much wider audience by 2010. The Serial podcast and the Netflix series Making a Murderer expanded public consciousness about wrongful conviction by the mid-2010s. Serial, while not settling Adnad Syed’s innocence, garnered innocence organization support, while Making a Murderer, although criticized for omitting incriminating evidence, displayed the ability of the innocence movement to generate popular suspicion of the justice system as millions accepted the idea that Steven Avery’s second conviction was due to police corruption.
DNA (and non-DNA) exonerations serve society as sentinel events that uncover systemic criminal justice system flaws. When the link between these system failures and wrongful convictions was made clear, this knowledge began driving justice system and government officials to correct deficiencies to better achieve the ideal of convicting the guilty and acquitting the innocent. This led to an ambitious reform agenda, fueled by extensive research and scholarship, which addresses the structural deficiencies disclosed by exonerations.
Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution began as a law school conference organized by Medwed. It is is aimed, retrospectively, at assessing what has been “learned from the use of DNA technology to remedy individual cases and reform the criminal justice system,” and prospectively, at “how can we change the criminal justice system to safeguard against future errors” (pp. 3, 8). One anthology cannot cover everything; fortunately, in addition to law (the orientation of this book), two other major realms of innocence scholarship—psychology and forensic science—are covered by excellent recent anthologies (Cutler, 2012; Koen and Bowers, 2017). Surprisingly, criminological research on wrongful convictions is relatively sparse (Zalman, 2017).
Each of the well-written nineteen chapters in Medwed’s anthology dives into the pool of innocence scholarship from the same springboard, succinctly articulated by Alexandra Natapoff: “The Innocence Movement has profoundly rattled our faith in the accuracy and integrity of the criminal process” (p. 85).
Many have written that innocence was not taken seriously as an issue “before DNA.” But Michael Meltsner’s exploration (“Innocence before DNA”) of this theme in three areas (identification, prosecutorial disclosure of evidence, and post-conviction review) brings home the extent to which even reformist defense lawyers could not see the innocence trees for the criminal procedure forest. His historical analysis should be required reading for law students in innocence clinics and incorporated into criminal procedure texts and courses.
Brandon Garrett (“Convicting the Innocent Redux”) provides newcomers with a conceptual overview and descriptive statistics of the factors correlated with wrongful convictions. He points readers to his seminal work which analyzed the first 250 DNA exonerations. Seasoned innocence scholars and newcomers to the subject will be grateful for this update that now reviews data related to a total of 330 DNA exonerations.
Richard Leo (“Has the Innocence Movement Become an Exoneration Movement?”) offers important new thinking on the tensions and tradeoffs in defining wrongful convictions and exonerations. It is inside baseball, but accessible for those who take the time to unpack the issues. The vital takeaway, at least for me, is that alongside the need to promote a list of purportedly “unassailable” exonerations (e.g., the National Registry of Exonerations [NRE]), the innocence movement should not forget the wrongfully convicted who are excluded from the NRE, including Alford pleas, exonerations without new evidence, and group exonerations. It may be time to generate a catalogue of such cases (and others) to supplement the NRE. The need to keep thinking about the definition of wrongful conviction is brought home by Margaret Burnam’s project (“Retrospective Justice in the Age of Innocence”) to posthumously exonerate blacks executed for rape in hideously unfair and patently unconstitutional Jim Crow-era trials (and lynchings)—even if factual innocence could not be established by present standards. Michael Radelet (“How DNA Has Changed Contemporary Death Penalty Debates”) also reprises the once “hotly contested” (p. 142) definition of a death penalty error based on the judgment of “a majority of neutral observers,” absent official exoneration. He graciously concedes the usefulness of the criticisms of this approach made by Stephen Markman and Paul Cassell, albeit in a footnote.
Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution focuses mainly on legal institutions and issues. One chapter that takes readers into other territory is Keith Findley’s “Flawed Science and the New Wave of Innocents.” He explores an area of “shifted science,” in which older ideas of scientific causation used to convict have been exposed as flawed: so-called Shaken Baby Syndrome or Abusive Head Trauma (SBS/AHT) cases. A particularly troubling aspect is that these convictions were based exclusively on the testimony of expert witnesses whose findings were purportedly conclusive of guilt. Findley’s tightly reasoned analysis (also applied to arson wrongful convictions) points out that while the science is shifting, courts have been slow to accept the new findings.
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Source: clcjbooks.rutger.edu, Martin Zalman, July 2017
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
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