Innocence Project

Date: Founded in 1992

Identification: Organization based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University that assists wrongfully convicted prisoners in using DNA evidence to prove their innocence.

Significance: As of late 2016, the Innocence Project claimed to have helped exonerate more than three hundred wrongfully convicted persons in the United States through DNA testing, twenty of whom were serving time on death row. The wrongful convictions that this organization has helped to overturn have been attributed to a number of different factors, including eyewitness misidentification, reliance on unreliable or limited science, false confessions, fraud or misconduct on the part of forensic scientists, misconduct on the part of prosecutors or police, false testimony from informants, and incompetent legal representation.

The Innocence Project asserts that the wrongful convictions uncovered by the organization’s work indicate that the American criminal justice system is in need of reform. Toward that end, the Innocence Project is involved in developing policy to strengthen the criminal justice system by addressing such issues as prisoner access to post-conviction DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis, evidence preservation, eyewitness identification reform, crime lab oversight, compensation for those who have been exonerated, and the creation of a national criminal justice reform commission. In one case, a witness was shown an assortment of photos from which the witness identified a person as the perpetrator of the crime, but it was later revealed that the police had placed a mark on one of the photos in the assortment to indicate to the witness which suspect the police believed was the perpetrator. Other cases have been uncovered in which witnesses changed their descriptions of perpetrators after the witnesses were given information about particular suspects.

False Confessions and False Witness Testimony

According to the Innocence Project website, in over 10 percent of the cases of wrongful conviction overturned by the Innocence Project as of late 2016, the innocent defendants pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit, and almost 30 percent of the cases involved false confessions. It is difficult to understand why anyone would confess to a crime he or she did not commit, but research has shown that some false confessions may be attributable to the fact that some people, particularly those with mental disabilities and disorders, may be persuaded or manipulated relatively easily into agreeing with authority figures. Individuals who have been subjected to lengthy interrogations will sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit as a means to put an end to their discomfort; often they do so believing that they will be able to prove their innocence later. In addition, police interrogators sometimes tell suspects that the only way they can avoid the death penalty is to confess to the crimes of which they are being accused.

Some people are wrongfully convicted because of false testimony given by others. In more than 15 percent of the Innocence Project cases that have been overturned through new DNA evidence, informants testified against the defendants. Such informants may have many different reasons to fabricate testimony. Another factor in wrongful convictions is eyewitness misidentification testimony. This was a factor in 70 percent of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases in the United States, making it the leading cause of wrongful convictions, according to The Innocence Project in 2016. The Innocence Project has overturned convictions of people who were convicted based on the testimony of individuals who were paid by the prosecution to testify, inmates who testified in exchange for release from prison, and informants who testified in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution.

Misinterpretation or Misrepresentation of Forensic Evidence

In some cases, convictions overturned by the Innocence Project were based on various forms of scientific and technical evidence (such as blood typing, hair comparison, bite marks, and ballistics) that lack the scientific certainty of DNA evidence . In one case, a scientific expert witness told the jury that biological evidence matched a defendant’s blood type but did not mention that this same biological evidence also matched the blood type of 41 percent of the general public. In another case, a bite mark was incorrectly matched to a defendant, with the result that he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Another person was wrongfully convicted when the jury was told that hair evidence matched the hair of the defendant and that the hair evidence could belong to only one in ten thousand people, even though this assertion was statistically impossible to prove.

The Innocence Project has also exonerated people who were wrongfully convicted because forensic scientists falsely testified, exaggerated their statistics, or engaged in laboratory fraud. It was uncovered that a former director of the West Virginia state crime lab fabricated results, lied in court about results, and willfully omitted evidence from his reports. This expert testified for the prosecution at trials in twelve states over the course of his career—more than a dozen cases in West Virginia alone. In Chicago, a lab technician’s false testimony regarding evidence sample matches resulted in the conviction of at least eight defendants. DNA evidence was used to exonerate these defendants years after they were convicted.

In another case, the director of the Houston Police Department’s crime lab testified that hair found in a sexual assault victim’s underwear could have belonged to the defendant and that blood evidence showed that biological fluids found on the victim came from the defendant. The man was convicted, but later DNA testing showed that the hair sample could not have been his and that the blood evidence could have belonged to an alternative suspect. The case was overturned after the man had spent seventeen years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Incompetent Counsel

Many critics have asserted that the criminal justice system in the United States is economically biased against the poor, and this bias is exacerbated when indigent suspects are assigned incompetent or overburdened legal representation. In some of the worst cases taken on by the Innocence Project, convictions have been overturned because lawyers slept in the courtroom during trial, were disbarred shortly after finishing death penalty cases, failed to investigate their defendants’ alibis, failed to call or consult experts on forensic issues, or failed to show up for hearings.

In one case in which a man was accused of the brutal rape of an eight-year-old girl, the defense attorney performed no investigation, filed no pretrial motions, gave no opening statement, provided no expert to refute the testimony of the state’s hair microscopy expert (which was later found to be fraudulent), did not prepare closing arguments, and filed no appeal. The defendant was convicted and spent fifteen years in prison before the Innocence Project was able to use DNA evidence to prove that he did not commit the crime.

The Innocence Project's policy department works in Congress and with local officials to pass legislation and administrative policies that prevent wrongful convictions. On June 17, 2014, Vermont governor Peter Shumlin signed into law reforms that help prevent wrongful convictions. In Illinois, in June 2014, legislation expanded the post-conviction DNA testing access law, which acknowledges that innocent defendants sometimes plead guilty to avoid a severe punishment.

Bibliography

Cates, Paul. "VT Governor to Sign into Law New Wrongful Conviction Reforms." Innocence Project, 16 June 2014, www.innocenceproject.org/vt-governor-to-sign-into-law-new-wrongful-conviction-reforms/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2015.

"DNA Access Law to be Expanded in Illinois." Innocence Project, 23 June 2014, www.innocenceproject.org/dna-access-law-to-be-expanded-in-illinois/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2015.

Junkin, Tim. Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA. Algonquin Books, 2004.

Kobilinsky, Lawrence F., et al. DNA: Forensic and Legal Applications. Wiley-Interscience, 2005.

Lazer, David, editor. DNA and the Criminal Justice System: The Technology of Justice. MIT Press, 2004.

Rudin, Norah, and Keith Inman. An Introduction to Forensic DNA Analysis. 2nd ed., CRC Press, 2002.

Scheck, Barry, et al. Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. Random House, 2000.