TIME Innocent: The Fight Against Wrongful Convictions

163 Pages·2017·7.88 MB·English

by  The Editors of TIME

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