There is much evidence that innocent people have been convicted of serious offenses who were later exonerated when DNA tests, not available at the time of their convictions, showed they could not have been the contributors of the biological evidence found at the crime scenes.
So far there have been over 100 DNA exonerations across the country. The most recent release, on Monday, April 8, 2002, of Ray Krone who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992, was also the 100th exoneration – though not all on DNA – of a death row inmate since the Supreme Court legitimized the death sentence again in the mid 1970's. That means that for every seven people executed in this country in the last quarter century, one has been exonerated, according to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), an error rate he finds unacceptably high.
At the occasion of Ray Krone's release, Senator Leahy, chief sponsor of the Innocence Protection Act (S. 486) – a bi-partisan bill co-sponsored by 25 other senators, released the following comments:
"Our nation this week reached an infamous milestone: 100 known – and goodness only knows how many unknown – cases of people being sentenced to death, since the reinstatement of capital punishment, for crimes they did not commit.
"There should be no shame in errors made by well-meaning jurors, because human error is inevitable. But what is deeply shameful is a political and legal establishment that lives in denial. What shocks me most about this case is not that yet another innocent man's life was ruined; it is that the prosecutor then called the system that did that 'the best in the world.' He is still back in the 1990s, the decade that saw Congress rushing to speed up executions of people like Ray Krone; Supreme Court Justices 'doubting' whether our Constitution even forbids executing innocent people; and a shadowy clique of bad prosecutors and pseudo-academics engaging in innocence-denial: pretending that innocent people were guilty, pretending that DNA evidence proves nothing, pretending that sleeping lawyers can ensure justice.
"The time for denial is over. We know that the system has identifiable flaws. The system did not work for Ray Krone in his first trial, or in his second. We know that it has innocent victims . . ."
". . . To expunge the national shame of denial, we need strong national safeguards for truth: a federal guarantee of competent counsel, and of DNA testing wherever relevant. . . ."
These are nice words, Senator Leahy, but does this do enough for non-DNA – the majority of criminal cases? What does your Bill do for those cases? The causes for wrongful convictions are, by now, well known thanks to the efforts of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld's Innocence Project and its affiliated projects in the law schools of many states, and they are not all due to prosecutor misconduct, ineffective counsel, or junk science.
Biological evidence that can be tested by DNA is available in only a minuscule number of criminal cases! Most prosecutions have no biological evidence! If we can rack up over 100 proven exonerations in cases where DNA is available, do we really have a right to think we do better in criminal prosecutions where no DNA evidence exists?
For a related story, click on Man Convicted on Erroneous Bite Mark Identification Evidence Finally Free.
