“Convicting the Innocent” not just a title of a book – Its happening too often!
Brandon L. Garrett in his book, “Convicting the Innocent,” examines the first 250 innocent people exonerated by postconviction DNA testing. It was not until Sir Alec Jeffreys developed the first DNA profiling test in 1984, that we ever realized that our system of justice in America may be convicting innocent people. Today, we have DNA to thank for throwing this failure in our faces,… and rightfully so. But I do not see anyone asking the hard questions like, …Why is this happening? What went wrong? What is going wrong? What can we do to fix it? Garrett found that of the 250 exonerees, 76% (190) were misidentified by an eyewitness. Are we placing too much credence in eyewitness testimony? You bet ya! Most recently, the Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Forensic Science has disclosed DNA test results for more than 70 persons where testing of biological evidence discovered in forensic case files from 1973 to 1988, failed to identify the convicted person. Read more on this issue.
It is my opinion that there is a significant lack of training for police investigators (not mandated in most states, if any at all); the pressure for them to clear cases; forgetting that they should be looking for the truth, not simply finding evidence that satisfies their initial beliefs in an investigation; not treating the investigation as a process involving multiple players; and prosecutors not willing to admit maybe they were wrong about a case, has caused this travesty to have been brought to the forefront by the advent of DNA. Was this happening before Dr. Jeffreys’ DNA profiling turned the investigation process upside down? I believe so. It was easy to remain pompous when all you had to do was accept the decision of the 12 people not smart enough to get out of jury duty (the jury) as being infallible.
