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TIME Innocent: The Fight Against Wrongful Convictions PDF

163 Pages·2017·7.88 MB·English
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INNOCENT The Fight Against Wrongful Convictions Contents Cover Title Introduction: Shaking Up the Criminal-Justice System Chapter One: The Stolen Years Ricky Jackson: A Lifetime Lost, Then Freedom First Person: My Life on Death Row Skeptic Turned Savior Case Study: A Battle Against Family Chapter Two: Forensic Science From Small Things, Big Results Alec Jeffreys: The Father of Forensic DNA Gary Dotson: America’s First DNA Exoneree The New Science of Bacteria Controversy: Using Relatives’ DNA Chapter Three: Cleared! Nick Yarris: Vindicated by Genetic Code Profiles: Seven Lives Saved by Science Chapter Four: Gender Matters Amanda Knox: When Women Confess Profiles: Wronged Women Chapter Five: The Fighters Book Excerpt: Ghost of the Innocent Man Profiles: The Exonerees’ Best Friends Chapter Six: Unjust History Wronged, Past to Present Bad Justice on the Silver Screen Chapter Seven: Moving On Cotton and Thompson: Learning to Forgive Profiles: New Lives The Next 25 Years: An Agenda Last Word Credits Copyright Parts of this book were previously published in TIME and People. Shaking Up the Criminal-Justice System Attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld co-founded the Innocence Project to free wrongly convicted inmates BY JIM DWYER New York lawyers with a common bond: Peter Neufeld (left) and Barry Scheck in October 1989 As long as there have been prisons, certain people have argued that they did not belong in them. A witness got it wrong. A cop or a lawyer mishandled evidence. An alibi was overlooked. And as long as people have been protesting their innocence, there have been plenty of skeptics to mutter, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” If you had to pick the worst year in the past century to say that the United States was locking up the wrong people for crimes at a startling rate, 1992 would be a bull’s-eye. Violent crime was cresting on every corner and, it seemed, in every hamlet in America. Counties, states and the federal government could not build prisons and jails fast enough. At this epochal moment, crossing the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and pushing against the historical tide were two lawyers, mismatched in height, perfectly keyed in voices, a Simon and Garfunkel pairing: Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, insisting that they be heard. Their subject was getting people out of prison. Innocent people. Buried alive. If the political and social climate were miserably inhospitable for such a cause, they couldn’t help that: a test for small strings of DNA had just become available—its inventor would win the Nobel Prize—that made it possible to prove that some people were serving prison terms, or facing execution, for crimes they had not committed. Scheck and Neufeld had not chosen the moment, but they seized it. After working as public defenders for the Legal Aid Society during the “bonfire of the vanities” years in the Bronx, they teamed up for an occasional case. One involved the new DNA-testing process. The technology was complicated, and it was still being refined, meaning the details that they had arduously mastered could be irrelevant in a few months. It might have been too much trouble for many lawyers, but Neufeld and Scheck believed it too important to leave to the exclusive use of law enforcement. Moreover, they saw that its implications went far beyond any individual case. Not everyone did. I met them in early 1992 when legal papers for one of their cases, meant for another reporter, instead landed on my desk at a newspaper in New York. Today, their claims would be mundane, commonplace. They astounded me: a test could look at evidence recovered years earlier, like the semen, skin or blood left by an attacker, and identify the DNA unique to every individual. In the case at hand, they were arguing that a DNA test showed that the semen collected after a rape could not have originated with the man serving a prison sentence for the crime. Impossible. After a second reading, I called them, and we met a day later. There was much more to their concerns than just this one case, both of them insisted. How? Neufeld said that by providing absolute proof of identity, these tests could revolutionize criminal justice, because misidentification plagued the system. Wait: revolutionize criminal justice? Come on. Yes, Scheck said, the tests were able to give people a brand-new look at old evidence —meaning that people who had been convicted years earlier might be able to prove what they had been saying all along and show the weaknesses in the traditional methods that few were willing to acknowledge. Not long after we met, word of the new technology was spreading along the prison grapevine. From around the country, prisoners were writing to them, asking to have their cases reviewed. There were so many letters, so many cases to review, that Neufeld and Scheck incorporated the work into a criminal-law clinic Scheck was teaching at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Neufeld agreed to co-teach, as long as he did not have to attend any academic meetings. Their students dug into the old court transcripts, and they all hunted down witnesses. This work was dubbed the Innocence Project. One afternoon, I visited Scheck in his office at the law school. Papers and legal briefs stood in trembling piles. On one wall hung a painting of Willie Mays running across center field; on another, Jackie Robinson was stealing home. Where was their Innocence Project? I asked. His gaze fell on a battered leather briefcase, stuffed with more papers. “Basically,” he said, “it’s in here.” The stories of innocent people, cleared and liberated, found their way into the press, onto television. The impossible grew plausible. In Jurassic Park, a thriller and movie, scientists extract a little bit of dinosaur DNA that had been preserved in amber millions of years ago. Across the country, lawyers recruited by Neufeld and Scheck, and others, pushed forward claims of actual innocence. Much of their work was showing prosecutors and courts that the new tests could give reliable results even on minuscule fragments of DNA, which often was all that was left years after a crime. The criminal-justice system was driven to disruptive distraction. Sometimes the evidence had been lost, or prosecutors and judges did not want to reconsider what they had thought was long settled. Case by case, the Innocence Project and its allies argued in the courts of law and public opinion that we could not afford to keep our eyes closed. An innocent person was behind bars, and because of that mistake, a guilty one had gotten away. A few years later, we collaborated on a book called Actual Innocence that focused not on how innocent people got out of jail but how they wound up inside one. Janet Reno, the U.S. attorney general, convened a task force to figure out what these exonerations were telling us about the customary tools of criminal investigations and prosecution. Besides opening cell doors for wrongly convicted people, DNA tests were laying bare some of the hidden facts of life in criminal justice. Some were familiar: At times, witnesses got things wrong. Jailhouse snitches lied. Police, prosecutors and rogue laboratories cut corners. Defense lawyers coasted through their work. People confessed to crimes they had not committed. Almost none of these errors were caught by the trial courts or the appellate judges, the supposed backstops of the justice system. There was more. What had passed for forensic “science” was often junk, disguised by white coats and technical jargon. A hair examiner and prosecutor in Oklahoma said 16 hairs found at a murder scene “matched” two men. But looking at hair under a microscope is often little better than guesswork. Nevertheless, both men were

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TIME looks at those wrongfully convicted, and the fight to set them free.
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