Constitutional Law

A Way Out of Jail for the Innocent

An editorial in the New York Times comments that although some studies estimate that up to 5% of the two million Americans in prisons and jails are innocent, there are few procedures by which the wrongly convicted can exonerate themselves.

A Texas judge was so delighted last week to free a wrongly convicted inmate — after 27 years in prison — that the judge bought him a steak dinner and taught him how to use a cellphone to spread the news. The fact that this happened in Texas, famous for its draconian criminal punishments, was heartening. Most heartening of all was that Dallas County, where it occurred, is turning into a model for the rest of the nation in preserving potentially exonerating evidence in capital cases.

Two factors play a major role in exonerations: DNA evidence and an understanding of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).