Two notable new legal commentaries from Slate on innocence and prison change-agents

Today I came across two notable new pieces at Slate, both of which justify their own posts but will end up combined here.  Specifically, here are headlines, links and openning paragraphs to whet appetites: 

From Austin Sarat, “Is Punishing Innocent People Unconstitutional?“:

Last December, Christopher Dunn asked the United States Supreme Court to order his release from prison or at least grant him a new trial. He is serving a life sentence in Missouri for a crime he did not commit, and he is hoping the court will agree to take up his case this spring.

Dunn contends that the U.S. Constitution forbids punishing innocent people and is asking the justices to declare that it is unconstitutional for a state to keep an innocent man in prison. A court in Missouri now agrees that he is not guilty. But Dunn is caught up in a nightmarish legal thicket. It is time for the Supreme Court to end his nightmare and say that this country will not tolerate punishing the innocent.

From Seema Saifee, “One of the Best Ideas for Ending Mass Incarceration Was Thought Up in a Prison“:

The United States locks up more people than almost every other nation. To dethrone us from that perch, scholars have crunched the numbers: Targeting only low-level, drug, and “non-violent” offenses will not meaningfully cut prison populations. Reckoning with mass incarceration demands reducing reliance on prisons for conduct that our criminal laws deem violent.  To produce such a significant dent in our prisons, political leaders and scholars turn to prosecutors, academics, policy wonks, and sometimes community groups for strategies. Underneath this hierarchy hides an unquestioned intuition: Those who benefit from freedom hold a monopoly on how to shrink prisons. So self-evident is this premise that it conceals a counterintuitive phenomenon: Promising strategies to reduce prison populations for violent crime have been incubated inside prison walls.

In a recent paper, I reveal how people behind bars have created concepts and strategies that have opened up new possibilities to reduce incarceration and reduce crime.  In fact, lawyers, researchers, policymakers, and abolitionists have harnessed these “inside moves” to do just that.