Victims of Wrongful Convictions - Essay Example

THE ROLE OF INNOCENCE IN THE EXONERATION PROCESS The Role of Innocence in the Exoneration Process Nobody truly knows the actual number of innocent people who have been wrongly convicted in prison. The thought itself mirrors the common knowledge that there are undoubtedly many innocent individuals in prison1. Everyone is innocent until proven at fault is the popular conception that is the cornerstone to every justice system. It mainly implies that no person should be reprimanded for any alleged offence, unless it can be proved that the convict is guilty. Sadly, a world where no innocent people are punished unjustly is a utopian one. Indeed, it is the perfect scenario when only the guilty are reprimanded, and the innocent walks free. However, this is not always to be, and there is always the likelihood that an innocent person is convicted2. This paper attempts to explain ways that people wrongly convicted get proof of their innocence. The causes of wrong convictions are wide ranging and comprise all features of the pre-trial and trial stages of the criminal justice process ranging from false allegations, incompetent police investigation, police misconduct, erroneous forensic science and evidence, and poor representation from criminal defense lawyers. Once an alleged victim of an unjust conviction has lost their appeal, there is a slight opportunity that the courts will be in a position to stop the conviction3. In these cases, victims of wrongful convictions are likely to have exhausted the legal aid unit and it will be up to them, their friends, supporters, families, pro-bono lawyers and voluntary groups to uncover the evidence of innocence and present it to the relevant authorities such as the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). 2Investigating a suspected wrongful conviction is a long and challenging process. Cases of high profile injustices like the Cardiff Newsagent Three and Sean Hodgson show that it can take several years of investigation before the evidence that leads to the quashing of the conviction is found4. Many projects that attempt to exonerate innocent people out of prison have come up. One such project is the Innocence Network project founded in 1992 whose principle objective is to get as many innocent people out of prison as possible and turn the experience of these people into a learning experience that could help repair the systematic failings in the criminal justice system5. The project exonerates people by use of post-conviction DNA where the DNA from the crime scene is tested against the DNA of the accused. Often, people wrongly convicted of serious crimes like homicide or abuse has a delinquent record for little crimes, meaning a record already exists. These people are normally convicted on eyewitness testimony, but with no physical evidence tying them to the case. Physical evidence from a crime scene is usually retained for many years. If the evidence consists of samples of blood, skin, hair or other evidence that contain DNA, this can act as an evidence to indicate that the person accused could not have done the crime. The DNA can also be used to catch the real criminal if it matches a profile in a database like CODIS6.3 An assessment of verdicts abolished by test conducted on their DNA unearths a trail of drunk, sleeping, incompetent, and overburdened defense attorneys at the trial levels. Innocent people are convicted with inadequate defense representation. In some cases the defense lawyer has slept in the court room during proceedings, failed to investigate alibis, failed to show up for hearings, or even failed to consult experts on forensic issues7. Another common element of wrongful conviction later overturned by DNA evidence is the eyewitness identification. Misleading line up techniques have been used for years without serious inspection. Despite strong proof of the inadequacy of traditional methods, and the availability of ways to reform them, eyewitness identification remains to be one of the most popular and compelling evidence against alleged criminals. False confession is another aspect of wrongful conviction overturned later by DNA evidence8. A confession that is not true is an acceptance of guilt accompanied by a narrative of how and why it happened. Its characteristics make it hard to research and the police rarely keep records of them. Once the accused has been convicted under false confession, it is normally difficult to prove their innocence. They also lack a clear estimate of the incidence rate of false confession. This complicates it for researchers to sample random cases that contain or may not contain false confession. Due to these limitations, most of the study on false confession is based on DNA analysis9.4 Adversaries of capital punishment have pushed for DNA based evidence to be used more regularly, and many of those who are for capital punishment have agreed that people convicted for a capital offence should be given an a chance to evaluate all information presented. The major challenges that result from extensive punishment are that a blameless person could be executed for an offence. One such case of a man who was executed in 1992 gained international attention in 2005 when a Virginia Governor, Mark Warner ordered a DNA testing on a 24-year-old sample evidence to determine whether Roger Coleman had killed his sister-in-law. Coleman had presented his innocence and though the DNA test was conducted before his execution, it was stated that lawyers might have misinterpreted his results10. Using a more advance technology, Coleman’s DNA was tested once again in 2006 and the results confirmed that he was indeed the executioner. This goes on to show that dangers of a wrongful execution still exist, and use of DNA should be used more frequently as an identification tool. Every wrongful conviction that has been exonerated through DNA evidence could have been prevented earlier in the process if eyewitness procedure had been proficient, if interrogations had been recorded, if the system had been more careful of jailhouse informants, if crime workrooms had been investigated with a lot of attention, or if other reforms had been put in place11. 5 Since the first DNA exoneration in the U.S, individual law enforcement agencies and counties have enacted these reforms. Currently, there are more than thirty-five organizations in the Innocence Network aiming to exonerate people wrongly convicted. However, just a small fraction of cases tails evidences that can be proved using the DNA tests, and even when there are such evidence, it is often destroyed or lost making DNA testing impossible12. In some rare cases, however, the Innocence Network has helped exonerate alleged victims through non-DNA-based evidence 13. In these cases, strong evidence of innocence is uncovered during the search for biological evidence and the client’s freedom is secured without any DNA testing. In some cases, DNA results alone are not enough to exonerate a person, but can help exonerate a client when combined with other evidence. The number of DNA exonerations also continues to decline slowly as the number of non-DNA exonerations rise sharply and continue to become the primary focus of the criminal justice reform system. The DNA-exoneration phenomenon will continue to slow down over the years then fade out all together as investigation units continue to run out of testable DNA evidence 14. Cases that lack DNA-based evidence require heavy investigations including finding and interviewing witnesses again or going through old files to find anything important that a trial lawyer might have skipped. Even when essential evidence is uncovered, exculpatory statements or witness recantations that were ignored by the prosecution, prosecutors, juries, and judges often treat it with a lot of skepticism. As a result, many lawyers refuse to present these cases because they are expensive and harder to pursue 15. 6 The report presented by the New York State Bar Association found that many wrongful convictions were reconciled because of law enforcement official mistakes, as well as the misidentification of the defendants by the witnesses and not because of new DNA evidence. One such case of non-DNA exoneration is the case of a man who had served 23 years for murder in St. Louis. A state judge in Missouri overturned his conviction last year when he cited the integrity of the prosecution’s main witness who recanted his statement that the convicted man was the killer 16. The judge’s decision came 6 years later, after considering most of the evidence, ruled that though they had a nagging suspicion that the wrong man had been convicted, it could not overturn the man, Darryl Burton’s, conviction because of many procedural impediment 17. Exoneration after a recantation occurs when a witness or victim makes a statement saying they lied or made a mistake when accusing the victim in a statement that was treated by the prosecution as evidence of the defendant’s guilt. Most recantations occur in child sex abuse and murder exonerations. Cases of murder often involve recantation by supposed witnesses, including the actual criminal and co-defendants. They also include a number of recantations by jailhouse snitches or witnesses who claim that the criminal confessed to them. In these cases, there is a large misconduct on the part of the prosecutors18. 7 The police who unintentionally or intentionally force the witness to make a false testimony are punished. The witness is pressured, subjected to violence, threatened, offered secret deals like reduced charges of the case at hand, or simply coerced or persuaded to give a false testimony. Unlike sex abuse cases, courts rarely overturn murder conviction based on recantation alone. Significant corroborating is often required to secure exoneration 19. Child sex abuse cases involve recantation by the alleged victim who claimed at first that they had been abused but later claim that no abuse took place. Many child abuse exonerations involving recantation follow a general pattern. The accused is convicted only on the child’s testimony who claims to have been abused. The child recants years later usually because of guilty conscience and makes a statement that the abuse never occurred. These kinds of recantation are taken seriously and the conviction is overturned quickly even when there is no other evidence that corroborates the recantation. Often, the false testimony was elicited by pressure from interviewers. The victim’s recantation is considered credible by law courts and leads to the exoneration of the accused 20. Publication of the devastating audit in august 2010 of the North Carolina State Bureau investigation revealed an ongoing practice of withholding vital blood test results from lab reports. The director of the lab was replaced and analysts suspended and removed from the case. Such was the case of Derrick Michael Allen who was convicted in 1999 for murdering and sexually assaulting his girlfriend’s two year old daughter, Adesha. Adesha was in a care ward where Allen was present too and he bathed the toddler 21. 8 He called 9-1-1 twice to report that the toddler had passed out and stopped breathing. Obsolete blood evidence was at the core of the case, reported to have been found by a doctor in the child’s vaginal area and on her pajamas and panties22. Prosecutors first considered the death penalty before offering Allen a deal that ensured he would serve at least 60 years. After being told that blood evidence would have him convicted, he accepted an Alford plea that allows someone to take responsibility for a crime without admitting guilt 23. SBI record letter showed that while a popular initial test defined for indicating incorrect positives had found blood on the toddler’s body, three consecutive, all more sensitive, found no blood yet those results were never documented, and the prosecution told the jury something demonstrably false, that blood had been found on the toddler’s clothes 24. It is the requirement of the court to turn over all possibly relevant information to the defense. The charges against Allen were dismissed in December 2010 after a ruling that the state report was prepared in an inaccurate and intentionally misleading manner 25. The judge wrote that the former district attorney and the current district attorney were aware that some information they had deliberately failed to disclose was exculpatory. He made the ruling that their suppression of material evidence favorable to Allen had violated his constitutional rights. He also observed that Allen had been coerced into accepting the Alford plea with a death penalty threat 26. 9 Exculpatory evidence takes various forms. It may be real evidence, or a material from the crime scene like fingerprints obtained from a weapon that do not match the accused fingerprints, or It may be a security footage video that shows the person who committed the crime does not match the description of the accused 27. It may be documentary or real, circumstantial evidence or direct evidence, physical evidence presented in court or even a testimony. If it attempts to show the slightest evidence that the defendant may be innocent it is exculpatory. The U.S Supreme Court holds that if the prosecution has access to exculpatory evidence, they are needed to distribute that proof with the defense 28. Exculpatory proof must be distributed with the respondent or his lawyer even if the prosecution thinks that the evidence is not strong enough. Failing to disclose the material will result in the case being thrown out as a mistrial, or being overturned in an appeal. Exoneration involving such cases is becoming increasingly popular because the prosecution is reluctant to pursue non-DNA based evidence. The Supreme Court base this ruling on the constitution’s due process clauses, stating that the prosecutors’ responsibility to find justice is to ensure that all evidence and not just evidence against the defendant is available at trial 29.10 Conclusion DNA proves to be the best evidence that is useful in identifying guilty people and exonerating the innocent. However, the problem is that the success of these DNA exonerations has effectively stolen the limelight. Due to the attention given to exoneration by DNA evidence, people who cannot prove their innocence by DNA evidence, because it does not exist or is lost, are ignored. If too much dependence is placed on DNA to prove innocence, then this process will condemn several innocent people that the courts will exonerate. It has to be understood that DNA evidence exonerates only a tenth of wrongful convictions and that the greater mass cannot be so easily exposed by DNA testing. Bibliography Banner, Stuart. The Death Penalty/An American History. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 455-500. Blue, Ethan. Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 221 Deborah Sulzbach, DNA Shall Prevail: Postconviction DNA Evidence: An Annotated Bibliography (Durham, NC: Academic Press, 2006), 45-56 Dieter, Richard C. Capital Punishment Is Too Expensive to Retain. The Ethics of Capital Punishment.Ed. Christine Watkins.(Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2011), 344-211. Leland Ware, A Comparative Analysis Of Unconscious And Institutional Discrimination In The United States And Britain, (Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2007), 114 Mueller, Christopher B, Laird C. Kirkpatrick. Evidence; 4th ed. Aspen (Wolters: Kluwer, 2009), 56. Michael Higgins, ‘Acid Test: DNA Databases Help Nail Slippery Criminals, but Their Potential Uses Make Privacy Advocates Nervous When it Comes to Arrestees and Ordinary Citizens’, American Bar Association Journal, 56 NO. 78 (1999), 64. Mueller, Christopher B.; Laird C. Kirkpatrick. Evidence; 4th ed. Aspen (Wolters Kluwer. 2009), 56. Mandery, Evan J. Capital Punishment in America: A Balanced Examination, 2nd ed.(Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2012), 89-100 Samuel R. Gross. ‘Exonerations in the United States, 1989 Through 2003,’ J’. Crim. L. & Criminology 58, no. 9 (2005): 70 Yale H. Yee, ‘Criminal DNA Data Banks: Revolution For Law Enforcement or Threat to Individual Privacy? 22 American Journal of Criminal Law 461 no 89 (1995): 78. Read More