Wrongful convictions

More than two years ago, David Kaczynski, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, wrote about what the state legislature could do to implement reforms that have been shown to reduce the frequency of wrongful convictions.

Now, he writes about the legislature’s failure to pass such reforms, which include "best practices for handling eyewitness identifications, better oversight and accountability for the state’s forensic labs, and mandatory videotaping of in custody interrogations of criminal suspects."

Mr. Kaczynski focuses on the case of Jeffrey Deskovic, who was convicted of murder and rape despite DNA evidence that clearly exonerated him.

My friend Jeff Deskovic can – and has – testified to the miscarriages of justice that can occur as a result of coerced false confessions. He should know. At the age of 16, he confessed to the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl after 7 ½ hours in a small room with aggressive police interrogators who simply wore him down with a combination of threats and false promises.

Prior to trial, the FBI crime lab reported that Jeff’s DNA did not match the sample taken from the victim. But police and prosecutors didn’t want to admit that they had the wrong man. A trial jury subsequently convicted Jeff on the premise that no one would confess to a horrible crime if they were innocent.

It took 16 years in maximum security prisons labeled as a sex offender before Jeff was finally vindicated and released after a brand new DA used her discretion to run the DNA sample taken from the rape kit through the state’s DNA database.

Talk about the human costs of a wrongful conviction! We all sympathize with Jeff. But we seldom consider the consequences of allowing the actual perpetrator to go free. In Jeff’s case, the real murderer raped and killed another young woman 3 ½ years after Jeff was sent to prison.

Addressing wrongful convictions in a serious way should be a no-brainer – not a controversial or a partisan issue. I suspect the reason we haven’t is because state prosecutors would prefer to police themselves – and prosecutors have plenty of political clout.

You can read more here.

Reducing wrongful convictions

Kevin Doyle, a lawyer who has defended capital cases in Alabama and New York, reviewed two important books for America magazine; one dealt with the convictions of innocent people, while the other was about the death penalty in America. The entire review is here, but we bring to your attention some recommendations to reduce the number of people wrongly convicted. The review explains why these are necessary.

• Police identification procedures should conform to written protocols, and each procedure should be documented contemporaneously. Ideally, officers unfamiliar with the specific investigation should conduct the procedures to prevent influencing witnesses with even unintended clues and cues. Judges should emphatically instruct jurors not to evaluate an identifying witness solely by the person’s certainty and not to imagine that the memory works like a camera.

• Forensic labs should stand independent of law enforcement and submit to external oversight in the form of periodic blind audits. “All examiners should be blind-tested for proficiency. The defense should have access to underlying bench notes and laboratory reports, and to their own defense experts.” Courts should stand guard against junk science.

• Before allowing a jailhouse informant to testify, a trial court should render a threshold judgment of minimal reliability. All police or prosecutor conversations with informants should be recorded; this will ensure full disclosure of deals struck and deter informants’ ascribing to defendants details learned from the police.

• Interrogations should be recorded, as 11 states and the District of Columbia currently require or encourage. Trial courts should scrutinize resultant recordings for hints of coercion or of the police’s feeding a suspect crime details the suspect then weaves into his confession. Minors and the mentally compromised should enjoy special safeguards.