Uncovering the Hidden Truth
Abstract
Since 1989, the American Criminal
Justice System has failed to protect citizens who spend years in prison for a
crime they did not commit due to several reasons. According to the Innocence
Project, an organization dedicated to help those convicted through post-DNA
testings, the major causes of wrongful convictions are invalidated or
improperly handled samples, eyewitness misidentification and official
misconduct. These three leading causes are supported after closely analyzing
case studies (Cameron Todd Willingham, Clarence Harrison, Kennedy Brewer and
Annie Dookhan). Recognizing the issue as one that needs immediate reforms,
states began to have compensation laws, robust preservation of biological
evidence laws, and ethical rules for prosecutors to share evidence. However,
money for infrastructure, training for officials in the system and stricter
regulations are few concerns remained to possibly help in saving innocent
lives.
Key words: DNA testing,
the Criminal Justice System, justice, case-studies, exonerations, wrongfully
convicted, reforms
Uncovering the Hidden Truth
A Corsicana, Texas house fire in
1991 that killed three girls also called an end to their father, Cameron Todd
Willingham’s life. Thirteen years later, on the 17th day of February, he
gathered in the visiting room with relatives, separated with plexiglas from his
parents, said his last goodbyes without hugging them, and said to them to never
stop fighting to vindicate him. He was gone and buried next to his children’s
graves (Grann). “Justice is Blind” an idiomatic expression that calls justice
impartial and objective. Ironically, justice is blind, not in the context of
fairness and just, but in the ways in which it has closed its doors to those
who are wrongfully convicted. Wrongful convictions happen frequently in the
United States, and are linked to leading causes. Improper or invalidated forensic science,
eyewitness misidentifications and official misconduct are top reasons, based on
several case studies that put a challenge to the Criminal Justice System’s
accuracy and rationality, calling for public response and immediate reforms.
The
famous Greek Philosopher, Aristotle once said, “at his best, man is the noblest
of all animals; separated from law and at justice, he is the worst”
(Brainyquote). Justice is the quality of being fair and reasonable”
(“Justice”), a concept taught and practiced by all faiths, countries,
individuals and groups. Yet, only few get the concept right. Imagine seeing a
kid fighting, holding two stuffed animals in his hand, with another kid, who
has nothing over a toy; the child with the toys gives it to the one who has
none. What the child did was just.
Similarly, a society’s guidelines for crimes, punishment and procedures to protect
the rights of the innocent is a form of justice as well. But what happens if
the same system that is expected to protect the innocents fails to do the job?
Then, wrongful convictions are likely to occur. According to the Innocence
Project, when an innocent defendant is found guilty, or when they feel
compelled to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit, it is known as
wrongful conviction. In other cases, a “jury unmistakably finds a person with a
good defense guilty, or where an appellate court, a part of the judicial system
responsible for hearing and reviewing appeals from legal cases that have been
heard in other lower courts, reverses a conviction in violation of the
defendant’s constitutional rights” (“The Innocence Project”). Regardless, the
National Registry of Exonerations has recorded 1576 exonerations in the United
States since 1989, of which 112 were sentenced to death, and 265 spent more
than 20 years behind bars. “There are enough doubts..touching intimately on the
integrity of the system that we should be concerned” writes Alex Kozinski, the
nation’s most prominent judges in a news article (Volokh). There is a prevalent
problem to see the system as unjust, and multiple resources indicate that there
is more to uncover than the numbers, first being errors in science.
Science is not perfect, and with the
advancing technology used in the criminal justice to help resolve criminal
cases in a faster pace, tests can produce many errors. Ultimately, experts base
their evaluations on scientific testing like DNA. DNA stands for
Deoxyribonucleic acid, a carrier of genetic information and a “self-replicating
material, present in nearly all living organisms as the main constituent of
chromosomes,” and with its testing, a person can be found guilty of his or her
crime (“DNA”). Since the 1980s, the
technology has helped in solving the nation’s high violent crimes but there
remains some issues. While the testing was developed through extensive
scientific research at top academic centers, many other forensic techniques –
such as “hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, firearm tool mark analysis and
shoe print comparisons – have never been subjected to rigorous scientific
evaluation.” Commonly one may think shoe prints are easy to take, there’s no
room for errors however, forensics techniques that have been properly validated
– such as serology, commonly known as blood typing – are sometimes improperly
conducted or inaccurately conveyed in trial testimony (NAACP). More than 300 documented
exonerations of innocent prisoners through post-conviction DNA tests from 1989
to 2014 show that the traditional mechanisms of error correction in our system
are insufficient. The direct appeal (in which a defendant challenges a criminal
conviction secured at the trial level to a higher court), is inapt to address
errors based in fact as opposed to law. In addition, classic
"collateral" remedies, such as habeas corpus, are loaded with statutes of limitations and other procedural hurdles
too high even for the innocent to clear. Going forward, it addresses both the
substantive and the procedural flaws that can yield miscarriages of justice. Even
worse, DNA evidence is available in only a fraction of all criminal cases. Only
a small number of individuals who claim that they are innocent can receive
attention of organizations like the Innocence Project website with the proper
resources to exonerate, absolve someone from blame for a fault or wrongdoing
(Olney et.al 402). Hundreds of cases of people freed from post-conviction DNA
analysis are available on the Innocence Project that were first convicted due
to errors in science, even if DNA testing is a potent tool.
DNA evidence is so powerful that it
has been the only reason for some criminals to stay away from their families or
reunite with their loved ones afterwards. It has played a role in about 50
percent of wrongful convictions.
As depicted in figure 1, out of 85 cases of
people convicted wrongfully, 29 cases were the immediate result of Questionable
Forensic Evidence or Testimony. The Innocence Project is the largest
organization that works on exoneration cases of those wrongfully convicted
through improper testing’s like DNA analysis and pushes the government to
reform the criminal justice system. Overall, its mission is to free hundreds of
people in jail and give them justice, by collaboratively working with the law
through legal work and as well as give support to the exonerate as they begin
to rebuild their lives. People like Clarence Harrison and Kennedy Brewer are of
the few that spent years in jail for a crime they did not commit.
 |
| Figure 1: Courtesy of the Forensic Science Magazine |
Harrison was exonerated in 2004
after being in prison for 17 years in Georgia for rape, robbery and kidnapping
a 25-year-old woman from the bus stop. At the request of the DeKalb County
Public Defender’s office, slides from the rape kit were sent to a commercial
lab for DNA analysis where the lab was unable to perform DNA analysis on the
slides. Despite that, Harrison did not give up and contacted the Georgia
Innocence Project in 2003. He was told in the early 1990s that all the evidence
had been destroyed because the last slide was sent for DNA analysis but later
discovered that one slide contained evidence from the rape kit still existed,
from where it was determined that Harrison was innocent. Similarly, Brewer was
arrested in Mississippi for killing his girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter
and was sent to death row. A semen sample was recovered from the victim’s body
but was “deemed insufficient for DNA testing.” After some analysis of bite
marks, which in fact were of insect bites, advanced DNA testing was conducted,
excluding Brewer to be the possible perpetrator. In 2008, charges against
Brewer were dropped and he was free. In analyzing both cases, it can be seen
evidence was improperly handled, there were reporting of no tests conducted,
outright falsification, reporting inconclusive reports as conclusive and
failing to report any conflicting results. Even though, science is the most
reliable tool to help put criminals in jail, it can still produce incorrect
results, and affect innocent’s life. In most cases, if testings are not done,
then witness identification is enough, or perhaps, the only evidence to prove
the innocent, guilty.
Often, it is normal to mistaken
someone or something for what it is not. If that happens, all is needed is an
apology and the situation normalizes. Thirty-four percent of innocent
exonerations responsible for eyewitness misidentification is not normal. For it
to be the leading cause of the wrongfully convicted is certainly not normal.
Misidentifying a witness does not only relate to a stranger committing a crime
toward another, there are two common types; robbery and rape. A human’s memory
cannot remember and record all information; it drops most out of short-memory
and stores some in the long-term memory. In stressful situation like robbery,
murder, or rape- recalling information becomes tougher and in extreme cases
impossible to identify the witnesses or perpetrator. In these situations, many
victims become confused and frustrated. Indications like these should be used
cautiously but unfortunately, prosecutors and police rely on eyewitness evidence
as the main piece to convict (Stenzel). A well-known incident is that of the
story of Ronald Cotton, who served 10 years in prison for someone’s crime.
Eyewitness misidentification
testimony is a factor in 75 percent of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases,
of which, according to the Innocence Project, 40 percent is involves a
cross-racial identification, where studies indicate that people are less able to
recognize faces of a different race on their own. For example, in the Book Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and
Redemption, the rape survivor, Jennifer Thompson misidentified the actual
perpetrator with Ronald Cotton, a high-school dropout, which led to him serving
in jail for 10 years for a crime he did not commit. Thompson was “so sure of
her selection that even after DNA evidence proved the defendant was innocent,
she had a difficult time believing the truth” (Stenzel 510). The National
Registry of Exonerations writes that the contributing factor for his conviction
was only based on the witness testimony. Cotton was exonerated through DNA
evidence in 1995 but his time in prison never came back. “I felt like someone
pushed a knife through me” Cotton describes his feelings in a 60-minute special
interview when Thompson pointed at him, in surety in court that he was the
rapist (“Keppler Speakers”).
The real criminal had died; Thompson and Cotton, after granted freedom
traveled together to educate hundreds of the Criminal Justice System and about
rape (Image 2). Courts have acknowledged that eyewitness misidentification
exist because of factors like high stress, a person’s memory diminishes, weak
correlation between a witness's confidence in his or her identification, but it
is one big portion of why innocents are deprived from life. Another one is the
work of corrupt and untrustworthy people in the system.
 |
| Figure 2: Courtesy of the Innocence Project |
A human has a natural tendency to
seek support from people who they trust, and just like that, evidence is put in
the hands of people that the system trusts. Justice vanishes when the same
people expected of help in the crucial field are not reliable. Think of it this
way; if there is a computer of no use and that which contains virus, in a few
days the item is either fixed or thrown away. That is not the case in the
Criminal Justice System. The Golden Gate University Law Review indicates that
in a survey of the causes of wrongful convictions, “prosecutorial misconduct
was listed as a cause in nearly half of the cases. In twenty-five percent of
those cases, the type of misconduct was the knowing use of false testimony.” In
a case of Hayes v. Brown false evidence was present that misled the judge,
jury, and the council. The prosecutor gave an incentive to lie- about which the
jury was not informed, leading to a death sentence of Blufford Hayes. “The
court never looked beyond the government's assertions and take into
consideration that the prosecutor’s duplicitous conduct might have affected the
jury’s verdict in any form” (Lynn). Courts are expected to analyze a case further, not blindly trust
what is presented to them. When it occurs, people also turn their backs, never
to believe again.
 |
| Figure 3: Courtesy of the New Yorker Magazine |
Sadly, in the case of Willingham, the father of three
children that died in a fire in their home as shown in figure 3, is sitting at
his death row, even after insisting upon his innocence and refused to plead
guilty in return for a life sentence was a victim of misconduct as well. Dr. Gerald Hurst,
a Cambridge-trained chemist known for debunking arson myths, said so in a
report that Texas Governor Rick Perry regrettably chose to ignore the reports
which led to Willingham’s execution, even after a comprehensive report proved
that he was innocent (Wachtel). The Governor’s inability to look beyond the
faults in the case and neglecting the visible evidence shows how essential it
is to call for reform. 
Another case many defense lawyers refer to and use to help
defend wrongful convicted, especially those connected to DNA testing, is the
story of Annie Dookhan. She was a state chemist arrested for proceeding drug
samples received from suspects three times faster than her fellow colleagues.
Her ambition to declare drug samples positive that were not tested at all,
tampering with evidence, forging signatures and lying to the court, tainted
more than 40,000 drug samples. After her arrest in 2000, she pleaded guilty to
27 counts and was sentenced to three to five years in prison and two years’ probation.
Dookhan’s plea affected many innocent lives who were in jail for the crimes
that they did not commit (Seelye et.al). Surprisingly, no one in the lab had
questioned her behavior or bothered to re-analyze the evidence she was working
with. In an article published by Arizona Law Review, she said she “messed up
bad,” and amazingly, “her misconduct had gone undiscovered for nine years, even
though she testified--and was cross-examined--in at least 150 trials” (Driscoll
and Sean). That is lives destroyed- an unacceptable or reasonable way to
suggest that humans make mistake therefore it is fine. Mistakes happen and are
forgiven, but when a person pleads guilty to charges stemming from her playing
with evidence, forgiveness is not an option. Dookhan was only sentenced to
serve three to five years in the custody of the state Department of Correction,
and recently in 2016 she has been granted parole from her prison sentence. Her
attorney, Nicolas Gordon said, “the decision for her parole was ‘entirely
appropriate’ given her lack of prior criminal record. She is extremely strong
and resilient who will have a bright future.” There were no questions asked,
she was freed leaving innocents person incarcerated, guilty person released
endangering the public, and most importantly, millions of dollars are being
spent to cover up the mess that was created” (Levenson). At the end, the
integrity of the justice system is flustered and governmental policies are left
challenged.
With the consistent outcries and
demands from the public and organizations like the Innocence Project hoping to
make reforms in the system, the government is making some efforts to reduce the
issue. The innocence project tries to promote laws that will help compensate
innocent people for the harm experienced by false convictions. So far, through
the organization, 50 states have statutory access to post-conviction testing;
32 states have compensation laws; 19 states have implemented comprehensive
eyewitness identification reform; 24 states record interrogations statewide; 23
states with robust preservation of biological evidence laws; 50 states with
ethical rules for prosecutors to share evidence supporting a defendant’s claim
of innocence before trial. These are just some of the few things that are done,
but more can be changed.
The Department of Justice lists some
of the possible solutions that can be done to help reduce innocent convictions
in the US, after it being the country with more prisoners (with about 5 percent
of the world’s population, there are almost a quarter of world’s prisoners).
First, there can be an increase in the analysis capacity of public crime labs
where the initiative will call for $60 million in funding to use in services.
For example, that money can be used to provide basic infrastructure support,
build infrastructure through laboratory information management systems, provide
automation tools to Public DNA labs, give support for the storage of forensic
evidence, stimulate research and development. In addition, it is necessary to
train law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and Judges
(Justice.gov). The proposals may seem expensive and time consuming, but getting
a headstart is what counts.
Wrongful
convictions jeopardize the future of many families, and as Judge Kozinski puts
it, it impossible to consider that every one of the 2.2 million people in
prisons and jail are guilty. An acceptable error rate at 5 percent means
110,000 innocent people incarcerated across the country. A 1 percent is 22,000
innocent people (Volokh). When an inmate is released from prison after a
lengthy term, he or she is not returned to the same people or world. Their
children get older; friends forget; jobs disappear, and spouses find other
partners. A small research was conducted in a college writing to the sciences
class, where only a small sample of students were asked, how they would feel if
a loved one of theirs was innocent but convicted of crime? Majority said they
will feel enraged, and livid. Elizabeth
Flint, a Criminal Justice and Legal Studies major at St. John’s University
believes that compensation for these people exonerated should be a priority.
Government, she says, need to consider the years they have lost and put
pressure on them to analyze, train and immediately change any misfits they see
in the system.
Over the last two decades, an
alarming number of wrongful convictions have been caused due to reasons like
improper forensic testings, eyewitness misidentifications and poor official
conduct. Despite that, the Innocence Project’s phenomenal effort to bring
reform has successfully exonerated many innocents. Once knowledge is obtained,
seeking justice becomes easy. Taking small steps is key to reaching the goal.
Even though filling in the holes of the criminal justice system is a lengthy
process, simply educating oneself and others is a big indicator to helping set
innocents free. No matter what field it is, responsibility comes with a good
moral character, a person who is responsible and honest. A student majoring in
biology, starting now should carefully conduct research in labs especially
those with samples, so they are properly trained to be reliable in the future.
A student in psychology should consider working with families and victims of
wrongful convictions so another innocent individual is not separated from his
or her family on the next holiday. As researchers of education and educators,
simply talking about the issue to a friend can alleviate the thought in those
affected by the flaw of the system, that someone cares and is not arrogant.
Work Cited
“Help
Us Put an End to Wrongful Convictions!” Innocence
Project, Innocence Project, Web. 7th
April 2018.
“Advancing
Justice through DNA Technology: Using DNA to Solve Crime.” The United States
Department
of Justice, Web. 28 March 2018.
Seelye,
Katharine Q., and Jess Bidgood. “Prison for a State Chemist Who Faked Drug
Evidence.” The New
York Times, The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2013.
Driscoll,
Sean K. "I Messed up Bad": Lessons on the Confrontation Clause from
the Annie
Dookhan Scandal." Arizona
Law Review, vol. 56, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 707-740.
EBSCOhost, Dookhan
Scandal,” Arizona Law Review, vol.
56, no. 3, pp. 707-740.Web.
23rd April 2018.
Grann,
David. “Trial by Fire.” The New Yorker,
The New Yorker, 10 July 2017.
“Innocence
Project.” NACCP, NACCP. Print. 25th
April 2018.
Wachtel,
Julius. “ DOJ: Texas Executed an Innocent Man.” Police Issues. Police Issues.
Web.
24th April 2018
Thompson-Cannino,
Jennifer, et al. Picking Cotton: Our
Memoir of Injustice and Redemption.
St. Martin's Griffin, 2010.
“Touch
DNA: From the Crime Scene to the Crime Laboratory.” Forensic Magazine, 14 June
2016
Stenzel,
Carla. “Eyewitness Misidentification: A Mistake that Blinds Investigations,
Sways
Juries, and Locks Innocent People Behind Bars.” Academic Search Complete.
EBSCOhost. 1 June 2017. Web. 30 April 2018.
Olney,
Maeve and Scott Bonn. "An Exploratory Study of the Legal and Non-Legal
Factors
Associated with Exoneration for Wrongful Conviction: The
Power of DNA Evidence."
Criminal
Justice Policy Review,
vol. 26, no. 4, June 2015, pp. 400-420. EBSCOhost,
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KepplerSpeakers,
director. YouTube. YouTube, YouTube, 16 June 2011.
“Justice.”
Oxford English. Oxford English. 2018.
Accessed. 24th April 2018.
Volokh,
Eugene. “Judge Kozinski on Wrongful Convictions and Excessively Long
Sentences.”
The
Washington Post, WP
Company, 15 July 2015. Accessed. 2nd May 2018.
Levenson,
Eric. “Annie Dookhan, Center of Drug Lab Scandal, Released from Prison.”
Boston.com, The Boston Globe, 12 Apr. 2016.
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Identification Reform Act.” NCDOJ.
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“Aristotle
Quotes.” BrainyQuote, Xplore, 2018.
12th May 2018.
Flint, Elizabeth. Personal Interview. 21 April 2018.
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