Emerging technology and factors not adequately considered in previous years are beginning to prove that everyone in prison is not guilty of a crime.
Factors include enhanced DNA testing, sophisticated cell phone triangulation, video pictures, debunking of some lab tests, and facial feature identification. There is also new understanding of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and ineffective legal counsel.
In the last two decades, more than 299 individuals have been freed after DNA testing showed they were erroneously convicted of rape and murder, according to the U.S. Department of Justice-funded study.
“There appears to be no letup in the steady stream of prisoners whose innocence is established by increasingly sophisticated DNA testing,” according to the report. It quotes the national Innocence Project as saying about two-thirds of the DNA exonerations in homicide cases involved false confessions.
“Nationally, over three-quarters of known erroneous convictions (many of them in rape cases) involve eyewitness misidentifications,” the report says.
Forty-two percent of exonerations involved prosecutorial error, malicious conduct, failure to give the defense evidence that would prove innocence, and inexperience of criminal justice officials – not limited to prosecutors.
In a 23-year period, inadequate defense representation, “bad lawyering,” was the biggest contributing factor to the erroneous conviction in a large number of capital murder cases, according to a separate study by Columbus University.
In the wake of sophisticated DNA testing, six states have created innocence commissions and more than 40 state legislatures passed laws to help those convicted of crimes gain access to biological evidence for testing.
The survey examined several studies that found over a 27-year period, 14-25 percent of wrongful convictions contained false confessions.
Another factor is what the study calls “tunnel vision” – when criminal justice professionals “focus on a suspect, select and filter the evidence that will ‘build a case’ for conviction, while ignoring the suppressing evidence that points away from guilt.”
The report also blames “perjured informant testimony” for 15 percent of erroneous convictions that were overturned by DNA evidence.
We should “increase our attention to the failing dynamics of the criminal justice system, rather than simply isolating errors or causes that lead to erroneous convictions,” the report concludes.
