Learning from exonerations

Thanks to this post at ODPI, I see that Adam Liptak has this thoughtful new piece in the New York Times, entitled “Study of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA.”  The piece discusses two new forthcoming law review articles that examine clear-cut DNA exoneration cases.  Here are excerpts from the NYT piece: 

Brandon L. 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….

The 200 cases examined in the study are a distinctive subset of criminal cases.  More than 90 percent of those exonerated by DNA were convicted of rape, or of both rape and murder, rape being the classic crime in which DNA can categorically prove innocence.   For other crimes, there is often no biological evidence or, if there is, it can give only circumstantial hints about guilt or innocence….  Professor Garrett’s study strongly suggests, then, that there are thousands of people serving long sentences for crimes they did not commit but who have no hope that DNA can clear them….

Professor Garrett also found that exonerated convicts were more apt to be members of minority groups than was the prison population generally. For instance, 73 percent of the convicts cleared of rape charges were black or Hispanic, compared with 37 percent of all rape convicts.

The courts performed miserably in ferreting out the innocent…. Only 20 of the 200 even appealed on the ground that they were innocent; none of those claims were granted.  Perhaps the most troubling finding in Professor Garrett’s study was how reluctant the criminal justice system was to allow DNA testing in the first place.  Prosecutors often opposed it, and 16 courts initially denied requests for testing.  Yet DNA evidence can do more than free the innocent. In many cases, it also identified the person who actually committed the crime….

The era of DNA exonerations should be a finite one. These days, DNA testing is common on the front end of prosecutions, meaning that in a few years, the window that the 200 exonerations has opened on the justice system will close. We should look carefully through that window while we can.

Returning to the main theme of this blog, I think sentencing decision-makers and reformers have much to learn from exonerations.  It is clear that the criminal justice system consistently make particularly types of mistakes when assessing guilt and innocence; sentencing decision-makers and reformers should be noting how the system consistently make particularly types of mistakes when assessing sentence lengths.