Posted by Rachel on: 07.24.2007 /
New York Times — In April, Jerry Miller, an Illinois man who served 24 years for a rape he did not commit, became the 200th American prisoner cleared by DNA evidence. His case, like the 199 others, represented a catastrophic failure of the criminal justice system.
When an airplane crashes, investigators pore over the wreckage to discover what went wrong and to learn from the experience. The justice system has not done anything similar.
But a new study does. Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false - yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
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Comment by: April Terry
1 07/24/07 9:17 AM | Comment Link |Very interesting! My husband works for the appellate court in our district and he has told me for years that eyewitness accounts are not very accurate in most cases.
I learned this for myself when I was a witness to seeing someone suspicious who came into our office and stole a wallet. There was another witness to this person as well. When I described the man I saw, I described as wearing a blue and beige striped shirt, but the other person who saw him, described him as wearing a dark blue shirt.
I was astounded and asked the police officer how it was possible that two people who saw the same man, could give such totally different descriptions. He shrugged and said, “Ma’am this happens all the time. It is almost never the same.”
I have come to the opinion that no one should be convicted on eyewitness testimony alone. There must be some supporting evidence.
Comment by: Rachel
2 07/24/07 12:53 PM | Comment Link |I completely agree, April. I thought these statistics were pretty shocking: The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant.
I’ve heard in the past that eyewitness testimony is considered the least reliable type of testimony, but that it is often regarded as the most persuasive by a jury. DNA and other types of forensic evidence can be highly technical and confusing to a jury. But there is something very compelling about a person pointing a finger and saying, “THAT is the man I saw.” And apparently people are usually not being intentionally deceptive - they really believe what they are saying and desperately want to help bring the perpetrator to justice. The chilling thing about the article was realizing how many innocent people may be languishing in prison today based on faulty eyewitness testimony, with no hope of a reversal because there was no DNA evidence in their case.
Comment by: David H
3 07/24/07 6:13 PM | Comment Link |When I was a young reporter a colleague at my paper got involved with a story that involved an FBI investigation of a suspected meth manufacturer. The guy had found a tracking device in some gear he purchased and the reporter discovered a secret FBI program to bug these devices because they were popular with meth makers.
Probably because he found the device, the guy never actually made any meth. However, he was convicted of conspiracy to manufacturer the drug. The conviction was based largely on the testimony of two co-conspirators who had both been convicted and sentenced to prison for other crimes. One was released and the other given a shortened sentence for selling out their “friend.”
All of that is business as usual in the US legal system. What really caused me to re-evaluate what I thought about American Justice took place the first day of the trial. The young lady who had been covering the story from the beginning arrived at the courthouse. As she walked into the building she was grabbed by an FBI agent on each arm and carried into a secluded room in the courthouse. The agent in charge of the case was there and told her (according to her account) that he was sick of her meddling in the case and that they were going to get a conviction despite their lack of real evidence against the man in question. Then he told her he would bring her up on co-conspirator charges if she didn’t take a step back from the case. “This guy is going to jail and I will put you there, too,” she says she was told.
She came back from court and reported all of this to our editor who called the FBI. They denied everything, but based on her reaction it was obvious that something had happened. The story was assigned to a different reporter and the FBI got their conviction. The man who was convicted got his third strike (he wasn’t a good guy and probably did have every intention of making meth, het just never got the chance), which meant a long, mandatory sentence. His friends, both of who had been serving time for more serious offenses than conspiracy did considerably less time than him.
Me, I got an education in the real nature of how the legal system works in this country. It isn’t really about the laws or whether you break them. It is more about who you are, who you pissed off, and how much money you have. In the years since I have seen very little to make me believe there is much of what Christians would call justice in the American legal system. I would laugh were it not so sad that some Christians mix up God’s law and the law of this land, because they have few points of intersection.
Comment by: Benjamin
4 07/24/07 10:06 PM | Comment Link |David,
wow. That’s a pretty intense story. Your final sentence really hits home for me. I grew up among a group of people who very much mixed up God’s law and America’s Law–in some ways they saw america as the second israel.