Better a guilty man remain free than an innocent man be imprisoned. That is the bedrock of the American judicial system. But a closer look would show the foundation of jurisprudence is not as incontrovertible as we would like to believe.
The American judicial system shows the foundation of jurisprudence which is not as incontrovertible as we would like to believe.
Brandon Moon, a former University of Texas at El Paso student, had served nearly 17 years of a 75-year sentence after his 1988 conviction on three counts of sexual assault before he was freed when DNA evidence eventually exonerated him of the crimes.
The 43-year-old's rape conviction was taken up this fall by the attorneys and law students at the New York-based Innocence Project, which handles only cases in which DNA evidence can be used to prove the innocence of a convicted person.
The Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University is a nonprofit, donor-funded legal clinic and criminal justice resource center that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted through post-conviction DNA testing. "We take cases where DNA—biological evidence—is the determinant of innocence or guilt in a case," said Maddy deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project and a prisoners' rights attorney who has worked in the correctional facility system for nearly two decades. "Those cases are largely sexual assaults, rape cases, and sometimes murder cases."
The Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law was created by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992. Mr. Scheck was one of the high-profile attorneys on O.J. Simpson's so-called "dream team" of defense lawyers at his 1995 criminal trial.
"We receive thousands of requests every year for help, and there are also about 40 other 'projects' (like ours) around the country that take appeals for assistance for people: post-conviction innocence appeals," Ms. deLone said. For example, the Chicago-based Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law is another group that is dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice.
"Projects that don't do DNA cases, in general, tend to spend a lot more time talking to a person about his innocence and trying to make a decision whether they really believe he is innocent," Ms. deLone said. "We don't spend an enormous amount of time trying to vet the veracity of someone's claims of innocence. We let the biology do that," explained Ms. deLone.
Under the supervision of co-directors Mr. Scheck and Mr. Neufeld, three full-time attorneys, 21 law students from the Cardozo School of Law, and law students from law schools around the country work on behalf of those they represent.
"When we find a case where a lab technician or forensic scientist testifies falsely either purposefully or through negligence, we call for audits of that person's work to ensure that there haven't been other criminal defendants similarly wrongly convicted," Ms. deLone said.
"In the DNA world alone, there have been 154 exonerations across the country of people who were serving, in general, lengthy sentences: 14 of those people on death row and others often 25 years and up for crimes they didn't commit." People just like Mr. Moon, who throughout his incarceration maintained his innocence, even when a serologist testified that Mr. Moon was among the 15 percent of the population who could have been the source of semen evidence presented at trial.
"There are no uniform laws of evidence preservation across this country, so every jurisdiction has its own rules. Right now, it can differ even between adjoining counties," Ms. deLone said.
Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project, has said Mr. Moon would be released on $1 bond until his conviction is officially vacated by the state Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas. "In our most recent exoneration in Texas, we filed the statement of facts jointly with the district attorney in El Paso, who saw that the conviction was wrongful…and that his office participated in the conviction," Ms. deLone said.
Indeed, Ms. deLone noted that the Project often works with local courts to see justice served. "We do have many friends in law enforcement, because we try to undo wrongs, and most people are supportive of that. And in the course of exonerating these people, we often find the real criminals in some of these horrific cases."
Still, cases like Mr. Moon's represent a "horror of horrors" for a society striving to be just and may operate, in some cases, to undermine confidence in the justice system by others. "I think it's hard for people to believe that there are wrongfully convicted people. It certainly is a difficult thing for a prosecuting agency to come to grips with, although some of them have done that admirably…while others resist beyond reason," Ms. deLone said.
She observed, "It's easier to live in a world where you think everything works the way it's supposed to work. And I think these exoneration cases tell us it doesn't and also point to times where there are problems where we could improve the justice system."
The federal "Justice for All" Act of 2004 increases the maximum amount of damages that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims may award in cases of unjust imprisonment, from $5,000 to $50,000 per year in non-capital cases, and $100,000 per year in capital cases.
"I think you can never completely make up for depriving somebody of their liberty for what is often more than 10, sometimes more than 20, years, but some states and the federal government have compensation laws," Ms. deLone said.
According to the Innocence Project, "DNA testing…is not a panacea for the ails of the criminal justice system," so the Innocence Project is also active in the effort to pass new laws and implement new policies in order to reverse and prevent wrongful convictions.
"We say 'beyond a reasonable doubt,' so we have a reluctance, as a society, to put innocent people in prison…or so the story goes," Ms. deLone said. "But it's hard to imagine a judicial system which would absolutely be 'error free.'"
Nonetheless, with groups like the Innocence Project elucidating ways to improve the system, hopefully our error rate will go down and we will have fewer who are guilty until proven innocent.
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