SHARE THIS SHOW:
RECENTLY ON TOL:
TOL Our Town
- A tumblr site dedicated to the people and places that make up Oregon and Southwest Washington.
TAGS:
DNA Evidence and Eyewitness Testimony
Larry Davis and Alan Northrop spent 17 years in prison for the 1993 rape of a woman in La Center, Washington even though, from the beginning, they denied committing the crime. They got the Innocence Project Northwest to take on their case, and the group's lawyers and students spent years pursing DNA testing on physical evidence from the victim until their innocence was proven. Last Wednesday a Clark County judge dismissed the charges against Davis and Northrup, and after nearly two decades behind bars they became free men.
New evidence produced through post-conviction DNA testing has led to over 200 exonerations nationwide, and has cast a spotlight on the flaws in eyewitness testimony and visual memory that lead to wrongful conviction.
Not everyone sees DNA evidence as concrete proof of innocence, however. John Fairgrieve, the Clark County prosecutor on the Davis-Northrup case, cautions against viewing DNA evidence as an "ironclad alibi." Sometimes, he argues, an individual can have knowledge about a crime that constitutes strong evidence, even if it can't be tested in a lab. "Reliable evidence," says Fairgrieve, "comes in many different forms."
Have you followed the Davis-Northrup case? Have you ever been an eyewitness to a crime? What do you think about the increasing use of DNA testing?
Photo credit: Fan Fan 2145 / Creative Commons
-
"Only 249 convicts were proven innocent and had convictions successfully reversed over 20 years."
Are you arguing that since this number is relatively small, the efforts to overturn these convictions are a waste of time and money?
-
The Innocence Project is really small potatoes from what is in the pipeline. The nation-wide state budget deficits are curtailing prison funds. Christmas is coming for prisoners. Up to 15-25% of current prison population will be released because of budget shortfalls. Participating in the Innocence Project is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic when you and your whole cell block are currently being liberated because of funding.
But the Innocence Projects also works from the inside to bleed the justice system of millions of dollars for reopening and retrying cases especially in times of fiscal bankruptcy. Ask OJ, Scheck isn’t cheap. Cost of DNA retesting thousands of prisoners and researching cases versus paying for the running of prisons.
The biggest predictor of committing a crime is prior criminal activity…and some are very good-- in fact professional. The Barefoot Bandit looks like the typical preternaturally gifted Psychopath--he ain't no Robin Hood. And there are thousands like him, mostly in prison. And they all say they are innocent too. And a Schekian lawyer is on the case.
-
David,
In short yes. If you use your Utiliarian Model for effectiveness, let's consider what our goals are:
1. Increased Accuracy of the Justice System.
2. Increased Public Safety.
3. Cost Effectiveness.
DNA as a 'New' technology has a steep learning curve for the justice system which values tradition. Even as late as 2000, some investigations were not routinely gathering samples because of lack of training or funding or both. Now it is gathered, though not necessarily processed. But for rape cases, it is a smoking gun with a return address.
Let us say we have a pretty accurate or specific justice system and it is comparable to the rest of the Western World. It has a 99.99% accuracy that the defendant is Guilty. That means 1 person in 10,000 is wrongly imprisoned or wrongly held. IF we choose to eliminate that travesty of justice, it would be socially just and proper.
But if it cost an unbearable amount of a justice system that is already straining from budget shortfalls. And if there is perverted incentive, since Criminals have Court appointed and Public Supported Defenders, and have lots of time to play with appeals(--What are they going to lose? At least it will delay the process.)
What is the oppurtunity cost of this DNA appeal process? The millions of dollars costs would have funded a dozen State Patrol Officers. Money spent unwisely will never be recovered.
It seems the Innocent Project captures the romance of a likeable defendant who is framed for a crime he did not commit. But more than half of all prisoners insists on their innocence. The paucity of succesful appeals over decades indicates the majority of inmates CANNOT prove their innocence and are by default Guilty.
These Lawyers cherry pick for maximal publicity. The Main Beneficiaries of the Innocence Project are Showmanship Lawyers. And the Public will bear the cost in dollars and the lost services.
-
What a bleak, cynical view of the world and the way it works. Not to mention the glaring factual inaccuracies like the so-called '99.9% accurate' claim.
A recent study by the Seton Hall law professor D. Michael Risinger puts the share of innocents in prison at 3 percent to 5 percent. But that study looked only at capital crimes and with capital crimes the defendant generally has better representation than in lesser cases. But even so, a 2 percent wrongful conviction rate would mean about 46,000 people who are incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit.
I wonder what jacob would be writing if HE had been falsely accused of a crime, found to be 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' by a jury of his peers and incarcerated for 17 years for a crime he did not commit, costing him his job, his friends, his family, his reputation and placing him in a prison system that is, by almost any account, horrific.
As to the claim that the cost of assuring American citizens justice, in cases like this, is too expensive, I would respectfully point out that district attorneys and prosecutors could go a long way toward lowering the cost of such cases by allowing DNA testing where evidence is available.
Experience has repeatedly shown that prosecutors and D.A.'s routinely resist allowing DNA testing in pertinent cases and spend substantial sums of public money to do so, not because there is no credible reason to do so, but because they feel that the subsequent reversal of a case represents a failure of their offices.
This very resistance is a significant factor in the so-called 'paucity of successful appeals'. And the supreme financial irony is that it costs a lot less to do a DNA test and release the innocent than it does to keep a wrongfully-incarcerated individual in prison for 10 or 20 years .. or life .. or the death penalty.
Personally, I love the 'showmanship lawyers' claim. Apparently, frustrated by the the fact that he couldn't claim that these attorneys get rich defending the innocent (because, of course, wrongfully-convicted persons rarely have a lot of money), jacob has decided that they do it for the publicity. Think back; how many innocence attorneys of national stature can you think of? None? I wonder why?
Clearly jacob's personal philosophy and political ideology trump any thoughts of justice, empathy or compassion for others.
-
You mention that you don't have the resources to do DNA checks, yet, you have enough money to keep them in prison??
-
It is not the cost of DNA analysis. IT is the ARMY of LAWYERS that charge for billable hours. A 10 minute cell phone call will cost hundreds of dollars. A fax $500. A Coffee chat: $1000 plus the cost of the latte.
It is almost like saying finger print labs drive the cost of incarcerations.
OJ's Dream Team saved his hide on the criminal trial........But it BANKRUPTED him.
-
Unfortunately, eyewitness testimony can be so flawed that without solid physical evidence to back it up, it should rarely if ever be trusted. Not only does a person who is tramatized commonly provide false information, but many people lie with little concern for their "victim", the person now convicted wrongly. As a juror, I simply do not accept circumstantial or witness obtained evidence all by itself, unless it is overwhelming.
On a side note, someone who is wrongly convicted and their lives ruined should be highly compensated for this injustice by the government. It may help prevent overzellious prosecuters from pushing for trials and convictions without a much more solid case. Any falsely imprisioned person to recieve a minimum of 1 million dollars per year for this injustice.
-
Society should expend the effort to increase the accuracy and fairness of our legal system. Currently, it is too easy to be convicted of a crime without 100% certainty. Our society must focus on reducing and eliminating incarceration. Better home up-bringing, better education, more opportunity for people at the bottom of the well to climb out.
A society which says it's okay to allow a percentage of its people to lose their freedom wrongly is broken and scary. If you are a member of a privileged class the fear of illegal incarceration does not shadow your existence. Put yourself in the shoes of the under-privileged who don't have the resources, education or luck to extract themselves from the tentacles of the legal system when they are innocent.
The goal should be 100% certainty when it comes to an individual's freedom. Like your guest said; improperly convicting people is extremely corrosive to the validity of the legal system and to an individual's perspective that they live in a just society.
-
I only know with certainty one process that is 100% and that is DEATH.
Otherwise we live with uncertainty everyday: Will I die on my morning commute today? Is there an misestimation errror on my last 1040 IRS form? Is my child antisocial?
99.9% is pretty good for a complex expensive process. We cannot DEMAND 100% from anything. Even your Starbuck's Frappachino may be subpar today. :(
-
Jacob,
I'm not talking about a Frappachino, I'm talking about an individual's freedom. They're two very different things. I did not know that there was such a thing as uncertainty. Thank you for the illumination.
-
Mr. Fairgrieve has been allowed to present a wholly inaccurate and, in its distortion, dangerous interpretation of the justice system's function as it pertains to determining a defendant's guilt or innocence.
Mr. Fairgrieve asserted that the justice system does not determine innocence, only whenther a defendant is guitly or not guilty. Mr. Fairgrieve is dead wrong on this essential fact.
The US criminal justice system, as well as all state and local jurisdictions, operate under the inviolable foundation of a defendant's innocence. The process of jurisprudence, beginning with the investigation of a given individual's suspected role in a criminal act, is required and designed to operate with a "presumption of innocence" of any suspect or investigation's target.
The trial phase (or its parallels) weigh and consider the preponderance of evidence in service of its function of determining a defendant's guilt or innocence. That the court, and the volumes of legal writings, employ language that refers to a defendant being judges guilty or not guilty is an artifact of the internal reification of the jurisprudential process not to the Constitutional principle of presumed innocence.
At no time does a "not guilty" verdict rendered by a jury, judge or magistrate vacate, invalidate or in any way tarnish the presumption of innocence.
It is both telling and deeply disturbing that a prosecutor will visit violence on this findamental principle of US law. As an individual human being, a prosecutor may well harbor his or her own sentiments regarding a defendant, witness or victim, but it is the higher legal prerogative of innocence that must be honored. As soon as this principle is neglected, the system of justice is internally corrupted while its bond of trust with the community serviced is eroded.
Please ask Mr. Fairgrieve to correct his statement - in service of the public trust.
-
A just and fair society requires that its citizens engage in continuous self-examination, to recognize injustices and acknowledge imperfections. To those that argue against DNA testing on expenses, I would ask: if you were incarcerated on erroneous evidence, would you avail yourselves of the Innocence Project and DNA testing?
I recently witnessed a theft in my neighborhood and provided an eyewitness account to the police, including working with a police sketch artist. I can attest to the difficulty in recounting the most basic specifics of incident as time went by. I was surprised and disturbed by my shifting memories. After that experience I will always question and certainly would not want it to be the sole evidence in considering someone else's guilt or innocence.
-
The textbook in my ESOL Reading class included a chapter on Eye Witnesses, and of particular interest was the saga of a young man wrongly accused of murder, based on a a single eye witness testimony. To make the class more active and interesting, I did an experiment. I chose 6 female students from a concurrent class to come into our room quietly, and do an activity: write on the white board, take out the trash can, move the computer, leave books on a desk...
When they came in to my class, I went on teaching. My students looked at them and then at me, and then didn't pay much more attention - some had a few quick peeks. The visitors finished their tasks and left.
In the next class, 2 days later, I asked them if they'd noticed any "visitors" in the room. Then the "visitors" came in PLUS ONE EXTRA young woman, and we had a lineup. The class volunteered the info that they could remember about each. The "different" looking visitors were remembered best [tall, blond, Japanese] but there were a lot of opinions and much debate about the actions and clothing of the 4 Hispanic students....
Bottom line; there was concensus that the EXTRA student was in the original group. I told them that, had this been a murder trial, they may have just sentenced her to life imprisonment.
Judi Barr
-
It is agreeable that much of our justice system works, and perhaps the success of the Innocence Project is overstated, or at least romanticized. But, surely, as with most things, we should continuously try to improve the system to lower the margin of error. Within the justice system it is impossible to measure certainty, what would you measure it against? You would have to have some way of knowing certainty, before you could measure that certainty, and in many cases there is no certainty, there is simply the best guess. The reason we have a jury trial is because there is a judgement to be made, and judgement is not certainty, it is an estimate, an approximation. It is possible, in some cases, that the evidence is overwhelming, such as a clear video of the crime, where a jury is largely unnecessary, because the evidence is so incontrovertible that there is nothing left to judge. We conceived juries to lower the risk of inequitable judgements. And, in reality the work juries do is inherently uncertain, that is the entire point of them! If justice was certain, we wouldn’t need juries. Because of this, one never entirely knows whether justice is working, it is always a work in progress---you never get to ‘certainty’ because justice is always a guess. So the prudent and ethical action is to always seek better guesses.
-
Comments are now closed.
Barry Scheck, one of the OJ Dream Team Lawyers --who is so skilled he could get Hitler off on a technicality --is one of the key proponents of the Innocence Project. This uses DNA identification to allow convicted criminals to prove their innocence. Unfortunately, this is as rare as lottery ticket winners.
There are 2.6 million incarcerated in America. The Innocence Project has had immense media coverage and showmanship for actually very few reversals. Only 249 convicts were proven innocent and had convictions successfully reversed over 20 years.
The other 99.9999% of other convicts remain but more than half also claim innocence--and by the way they all have a new alibi. This shows despite a rare reversal, our justice system is by and large JUST.
By far most of these reversals are for sex crimes. The other side of the coin, is the DNA evidence leaves almost no doubt that recent convictions are almost bullet proof. Of course, Scheck does not reveal these TRUE POSITIVE cases since it does not back up his hypothesis of high false convictions. And rapists are being singly and successful targeted by new DNA techniques and the free ones all have justifiable paranoid fears.
There is a small minority of Psychopaths, estimated at 10% of prisoners that commit up to 50% of all crime. They have no regrets, no conscience, no empathy, will never work, no sense of responsibility, feel entitled to the best, and think society is a big smorgasbord for their pleasure. They are born predators and parasites and always seem seconds away from violence. They have the highest recidivism rates. The average criminal has a 70-80% lifetime rate of bouncing back to prison. The psychopath has over 95% chance of re-conviction. You will sooner reform them then get a Great White Shark to become a vegetarian. The ‘Three Strikes’ Law properly targets this subpopulation.