Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
The Wrongful Conviction as Way of Life
Try Learned Hand called "the ghost of the devoid man convicted" an "mythical dream." Simply in "Convicting the Innocent," Brandon L. Garrett shows that it can live a "alarming reality." Since the late 1980s, DNA testing has exonerated more than 250 wrongly convicted people, WHO spent an mediocre of 13 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit. (There is every ground to think that to a greater extent people have been wrongly guilty since so, just only these 250 feature been definitively exonerated by postconviction DNA tests.) Seventeen of the 250 were sentenced to pop off, and 80 to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Past poring over trial transcripts and interviewing lawyers, prosecutors and court reporters, Garrett, a law prof at the University of Virginia Schooling of Practice of law, seeks to search World Health Organization these 250 innocent people are, and wherefore they were wrongly convicted. His alarming conclusion: the wrongful convictions were not idiosyncratic but resulted from a series of flawed practices that the courts depend on every day, namely, unreal and coerced confessions, questionable eyewitness procedures, invalid forensic testimony and corrupt statements by poky informers. Garrett's book is a gripping donation to the literature of injustice, on with a galvanizing telephone for see the light.
Almost 90 percent of the 250 innocent people later exonerated were falsely condemned of rape, operating theatre Brassica napus and slaying, and 40 of them actually confessed to crimes they didn't commit, most adding specific details that only the real culprit could have known. How did this happen?
Garrett describes how the police, intentionally or not, fed details of the crime to the suspects — so recorded only portions of the interrogations so that it was difficult for defense lawyers and jurors to retrace the the true. Even the by selection recorded interrogations work painful reading, as the suspects offer facts that are inconsistent with what happened, and the patrol browbeat them into false confessions. (Detective: "You hung her!" Vasquez: "O.K., then I hung her.") Unfortunately, the State supreme court has refused to center happening whether confessions are dependable, asking alternatively whether they were coerced, or offered without Miranda warnings. Garrett says the best protection against sham confessions would personify to require that police record interrogations from beginning to end; at the moment, 11 states and the District of Columbia River are required or encouraged to record at least roughly interrogations.
In addition to false confessions, eyewitnesses wrongly known the accused in 76 percent of the 250 cases. The unreliability of witness identifications is now wide known, but Garrett was dumfounded to discover how flagrantly undependable the procedures were in the cases he examined. In 78 per centum of the trials, he found demonstrate that the police pestiferous the eyewitness identifications with suggestive methods, like indicating which suspect in a lineup should be selected, or conducting lineups where unmatchable suspect obviously stood out from the others. (Many of the convicted looked nothing like the initial description given by the victims.) Garrett learned that spell the witnesses were positive by the time of the trial that they had identified the right suspect, in more half the cases they had not been sure at the time of the initial identification.
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Of those exonerated by DNA, 70 percent were from minorities, and in near half of the rape cases involving blacks or Hispanics, the victims were white. (Garrett points taboo that "most sexual offenses, well-nig 90 percent, are committed by offenders of the selfsame speed as the victim.") Garrett criticizes the Dominant Court for allowing lineups that were unfairly conducted, and says the best means to avoid erroneous identifications is to utilisation a double-blind procedure where police officers fanny't determine the witness because they don't know which person in the lineup is the suspect.
Garrett found invalid forensic testimony in 61 percent of the trials where an analyst testified for the criminal prosecution, including overly confident claims of matching bite Simon Marks, shoe prints and hair samples. (One leading geneticist noted in 1989 that clinical and forensic labs have to meet higher standards to diagnose septic sore throat than to put a defendant on death row.) And Garrett discovered unreliable testimonial by slammer informers in 21 pct of the trials — informers who, in exchange for clement treatment from prosecutors, lied about hearing specific details of the law-breaking from their cell match. Garrett suggests this testimony could glucinium avoided if prosecutors were prohibited from promising informers secret deals that weren't disclosed to the DoD.
Garrett's statistical analysis is invaluable, but the to the highest degree dramatic parts of his book are those that provide narrative details of trials that failed to prevent the innocent from beingness wrongly guilty. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to try your innocence: most people preceptor't remember where they were on a finicky 24-hour interval months ago, and can salute only weak alibis. Specially memorable are the dignity and self-control with which those convicted asserted their innocence and recanted their false confessions.
Even when facing the death penalty at their sentencing hearings, these innocent people often maintained a noteworthy degree of poise. After the verdicts were read, roughly of them understandably lashed out in choler and then sought to compose themselves. In the Central Parking area jogger case, one of the convicted was taken kayoed of the court afterward he exclaimed: "No. No. No. Can't demand this. O, Lord. Jesus Christ. No. . . . IT's wrong. It's wrong. No. No."
Where were the courts altogether of these 250 miscarriages of justice? In 10 percent of the cases, proceeding courts known as the evidence of the innocent people's guilt "resistless," while the Supreme Court summarily dismissed requests to review 37 of the cases without big reasons. I teach criminal procedure, and after reading Garrett's book, I am looking nervy to future discussions with students of the many Ultimate Court cases that narrowly concentrate along procedural regularity, rather than encourage appellate courts to review the accuracy of evidence. Garrett makes a effective argumentation for enhanced access to DNA testing: in addition to clearing the innocent, DNA tests in 45 percent of the cases he studied identified the effective rapists or murderers, umpteen of whom had been free for to a higher degree a ten to institutionalize past crimes. And helium insists that by placing overmuch reliance on decisions made early in the fact-finding process, we place the innocent at an unnecessarily high take a chanc of being condemned of crimes they didn't trust.
Garrett ends by reviewing the most bright bipartisan reforms that essay to increment the truth and dependability of criminal convictions, like North Carolina's Actual Innocence Commission, which has compulsory the recording of homicide interrogations, expanded the procedures for preserving evidence and accumulated defendants' accession to DNA testing. But it's the stories in his book that stick in the memory. One give notice only hope that they volition mobilize a broad range of citizens, liberal and conservative, to demand legislative and judicial reforms ensuring that the innocent go free whether operating theater not the constable has blundered. "What makes the trials of exonerees so frightening is that they show how the case against an innocent person may not seem weak," Garrett writes. "The case may appear uncannily strong."
Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/books/review/book-review-convicting-the-innocent-where-criminal-prosecutions-go-wrong-by-brandon-l-garrett.html
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