Re: 10/22/98 - It Does Happen Here; The errors that make wrongful convictions frighteningly common.
It Does Happen Here
The errors that make wrongful convictions frighteningly common.
By Jayne Keedle
The myth is that everyone in prison says he's innocent. In fact, as anyone who has spent any time with inmates will quickly tell you, most people freely admit their guilt. Indeed, if they get to know you well enough, they'll probably give you more details about their crimes than you care to hear.
This was James McCloskey's experience when he visited New Jersey's Trenton State Prison as part of his seminary training in 1980. Of the 40 inmates he visited, only one claimed he was innocent. That one person, however, had a profound impact on McCloskey.
McCloskey began to look into the case, ultimately conducting a full-blown investigation. What he found convinced him that the man had been wrongly convicted. McCloskey took a year, working with investigators and attorneys, to help the man appeal his earlier conviction. He didn't rest until the man walked free.
Along the way, McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, dedicated to freeing innocent people who have been sentenced to death or life in prison. The Princeton, N.J.-based organization has, to date, been responsible for the release of 19 people convicted of crimes they did not commit.
In 1992, attorney Barry Scheck -- best remembered for his work on O.J. Simpson's "dream team" -- and Peter Neufeld founded the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York. That project has freed more than 30 wrongly convicted people, many of them doing time for sexual assault, by conducting DNA tests on evidence that was gathered but never tested.
Last year, the Innocence Project was so swamped by requests from inmates claiming innocence that it began establishing Innocence Project Centers at law and journalism schools around the country.
McCloskey offers these explanations -- all of which are echoed by experts and criminal justice system workers -- for the plethora of wrongful convictions in America:
* Shoddy police work: "Their job is to clear the books, and the higher percentage of arrests they make, the better they look," McCloskey says. "That's a real important element in the pressure that police feel to make an arrest." Under such pressure, officers might scapegoat someone conveniently close to a crime scene, someone they know has a criminal record, thinking that "he's probably guilty of something." "I might add, race comes into it as well," McCloskey says.
* Presumption of guilt: Many jurors assume the alleged criminals wouldn't be on trial if they didn't belong there.
* Perjury by police: "Jurors have to be very careful about blindly accepting the word of a police officer," McCloskey says. "I'm not saying they all lie, but all the law enforcement officers in cases of wrongful conviction that we see are not forthcoming with testimony and information that could help the defendant."
* False witnesses for the prosecution: The most common problem, McCloskey says, "is erroneous, manipulated, coerced false or wrong eyewitness identification." Even well-intentioned eyewitnesses have been shown to be often unreliable. The problems are compounded when police and prosecutors rely heavily on eyewitnesses who may have a reason to lie on the stand -- perhaps to get a deal, to get revenge against the accused or to get themselves off the hook for the same crime.
* Phony jailhouse confessions: Informants often claim they heard another inmate confess to a crime, trading the information for their freedom. McCloskey thinks they're so often lying that their information ought to be banned entirely.
* Prosecutorial misconduct: When a prosecutor makes a deal to get testimony needed to win a case -- but has reason to suspect that the testimony is false -- that's suborning perjury. According to McCloskey, it happens too often. Another problem, he says: Prosecutors so focused on winning that they "suppress information that goes to the innocence of the defendant so they can make it easier for themselves at trial."
* Incompetent defense counsel: "Uncaring, dismissive, lazy defense lawyering," is another problem McCloskey sees a lot. "One thing that innocent people have in common with each other is they are indigent; they have no money to provide funds or personnel for their defense." Public defenders, he says, may be too inexperienced or too overworked to do justice to the case.
In Connecticut the problem of overburdened public defenders is so acute that the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union has a class action pending against the state to try to limit public defender caseloads. Without such limits, the CCLU says, criminal defendants who cannot afford private lawyers do not receive constitutionally adequate representation. (The public defenders don't support the suit: While their budgets are tight, they say, they're giving their clients adequate legal help.)
Public defenders are also hampered by a lack of resources to conduct a complete, independent investigation. Unlike the prosecutor, they can't command the resources of the whole police department to help make a case.
Manipulation of evidence: Forensics experts or court psychologists may often feel their job is to help the state make the case. "Rather than purely offer objective scientific evidence, they exaggerate, they lie and they manufacture evidence," McCloskey says. "We have seen this many times in wrongful convictions."
The biggest mistake the nation may be making now, according to justice experts, is that no one admits when a mistake has been made. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, when it comes to light that an innocent person has been convicted, there's not even a slap on the wrist," McCloskey says. The people responsible, he adds, "just go about their business as usual."
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