Actual Innocence

Rating:
Summary: Actual Innocence
Review: Pastor Neimoeller, a victim of the Nazis of Germany said:

"First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist. Next they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."

I am quoting this statement because it harkens back to the constant denials by mainstream America concerning the asymmetric application of the justice system. Blacks, of which I am one, and other ethnic minorities have been complaining about how they are chaffing under the legal system. Blood-curdling cries of foul were and still are dismissed as nothing but the incessant symptoms of the persecution syndrome. America could not be so dangerously wrong and this book bears testimony to that. This abuse of power is deeply entrenched. At the beginning, blacks had to bear its brunt and now it has started spreading its tentacles to poor white men. The affluent better pay heed to what is going on because, like Pastor Neimoeller found out, by the time those tentacles reach for them, there will be nobody left to help them. This book ought to serve as an alarm bell. It is well written and straight to the point. I would recommend its inculcation into law school carricula.

Rating:
Summary: Must read for all in favour of the death penalty
Review: Public prosecutors lie and withhold exculpatry evidence, judges refuse to let inmates go even though DNA-tests prove inmates innocence and juries convict people who were hundreds of miles away from the crime scene - and George W. Bush refuses to let a convicted, but innocent, man leave jail. This book should be forced reading for all proponents of the death penalty. Maybe then there would be a real discussion about the massive numbers of innocent people who have been released from Reath Row - because they were innocent. What happens when americans learn that innocent people have also been gassed/electrocuted or killed with a needle. Is death penalty still a valid option?

Rating:
Summary: Innocent Citizens, Guilty System
Review: The book details the history of ten cases of men who served years in prison for crimes committed by others, and were eventually exonerated by DNA technology. It also touches briefly on perhaps a hundred other cases. As human interest, it is compelling. As an insight into the "system" it is chilling.

How do innocent citizens get convicted of crimes they had nothing to do with? It's easier than you might think. Police rig photo line-ups to induce a witness identification, and then reinforce tentative IDs until they become positive. In court, they simply lie in order to give justice a little push in the right direction. Laboratories - dependent on police and prosecutors for business - fudge or falsify forensic tests to help out their client. Prosecutors withhold exculpatory evidence from the defense, and use testimony they know to be untrustworthy without checking it out. (The prevailing ethic seems to be that they haven't done anything wrong unless they *know* it to be false. One prosecutor used the "jailhouse confession" testimony of a witness to put a defendant on death row, even though a man put on death row by nearly identical testimony from that same witness had been exonerated and released.) Governors drag their feet in granting pardons to men whom DNA tests have conclusively proven to be innocent. (A prisoner in Oklahoma remained incarcerated for 6 years after DNA lab results had exonerated him.)

Defense lawyers -- usually working for very low pay -- often don't bother to vigorously challenge prosecution witnesses. They don't investigate to verify their client's story, or to locate and present solid alibi witnesses. Many have an astonishing faith in the police and prosecutors, and suppose that their client wouldn't have been charged if he wasn't guilty. They pressure their clients to accept a plea bargain, and become so miffed at their refusal that they refuse to prepare them for the witness stand. Theatrics is poor substitute for preparation.

Only a small sampling of criminal cases involve biological evidence. If it is a fair random sample, then a large number of innocent people whose convictions can never be overturned by DNA are in prison, and new ones are convicted every year. DNA exonerations are a only a window into a system afflicted with very deep rot.

The book contains many common sense suggestions for improvement. At the heart of many of them is accountability. Police and prosecutors run essentially no chance of getting caught for fabricating evidence or falsifying testimony. Once convicted and in prison, the defendants are buried there. The system is presumed to have worked properly, and the possibility that the wrongdoing will ever come to light is practically nil. Even when they do get caught, thyere are no consequences to them personally. Prosecutors don't prosecute each other or bring charges against witnesses who have testified for the state. And the law gives broad civil immunity to police officers. Almost none of the police officers, perjured witnesses, or prosecutors involved in the book's cases was punished.

The advent of DNA took the system by surprise, and shined an unexpected light on the rot. Officials were surprised and perhaps embarrassed, despite their pronouncements to the contrary. When a building collapses, or a hospital patient undergoes the wrong operation, or an airplane crashes, there is an investigation. People are disciplined and procedures are changed to prevent a recurrence. In the analogous disaster for the criminal justice system -- the wrongful conviction of an innocent person -- the system confidently affirms that it did everything right.

We are in the golden age of DNA exonerations. The window is open to public scrutiny and the possibility of reform. But we are approaching the day when we will have exonerated all of the wrongfully imprisoned who can be exonerated by DNA -- everyone whose case evidence has not been degraded, lost, or destroyed. The word is out in the law enforcement community to be on good behavior if a new case is among that small minority where there is biological evidence. As to all others, the old rules still apply. The public is more acutely aware than it has ever been of how many innocent people are sent to prison, and of just how impervious the system is to self-correction. Once the DNA exonerations cease, that awareness will fade. The window to reform will close and the opportunity will be gone.

No human system can be perfect. There will always be mistakes. But they should be honest mistakes. The system should be on guard against them, and be as willing to exonerate the innocent as it is to convict the guilty. This book is absolute must reading for everyone who believes that "justice" is not a synonym for "punishment".

Rating:
Summary: A timely evaluation of how the American Criminal Justice Sys
Review: The development of DNA technology allowed around 65 people to prove their innocence. Not just to raise some doubt about a technicality of their conviction or to find a legal loophole but to show that they were actually innocent of the crimes for which they had been charged.

Now days the use of DNA has been incorporated into police investigations in most countries and it will not only prove guilt but it will enable innocent people to be removed from the list of potential suspects. This book is interesting as it gives a snap shot of how the American criminal justice system works and why wrongful convictions occur.

One of the big problems is the unreliability of identification evidence. This book shows how that sort of evidence can be faulty. People will identify suspects for a range of reasons. If a crime occurs, and a person is seen in the lineup that looks familiar it is not uncommon for that person to be picked as the perpetuator. However it is easy for people to become confused and pick people who have had nothing to do with the crime. One example in the book is of the identification by a ticket seller of a person who's face was familiar as he had purchased a ticket some time prior to the crime but who in fact had been overseas at the time the crime had been committed. Another was of someone who was picked as a criminal but the reason for the selection would seem to be that he had lived in the same neighbourhood. In all these cases the victim or witness honestly believes in the guilt of the person who is misidentified. In one case mentioned in this book the DNA evidence in the end cleared the initial suspect but the victim still lives with that face in her mind as the man who raped her.

Identification is not the only reason why innocent people go to jail for crimes they do not commit. The book examines cases in which authorities concoct evidence, prosecutors fail to disclose exculpatory material and defendants are represented by incompetent Attorneys.

One of the sad things about this book is that on average the people who were wrongly convicted spent an average of close to ten years each in jail. Some were entitled to compensation others to nothing at all.

The authors suggest that the problems that led to these injustices still exist in the system and that a certain number of people will, as a result be spending long times in prison for crimes they did not commit. The final appendix of the book is a number of suggested reforms to the legal system.

The book is not written that well and has a certain amount of padding which makes for rather dull reading but despite that it is an important book in evaluating the American Criminal Justice System.

Rating:
Summary: Actual Innocence Avoids the PROBLEM
Review: The reader should first go through Appendix 1 and 2 of this book, in order to understand what the authors are driving at. Appendix 1 has a list of reforms, which they claim will cut down greatly on convictions of innocent people. Appendix 2 has a number of pie and bar charts that give details concerning 62 exonerations, via DNA testing, of people convicted in the US for crimes like rape and murder. The twelve chapters are devoted to explanations of particular cases, most drawn from the 62, that bolster the arguments they make for reforms.

One main theme throughout the book is the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, even when the eyewitness is very positive about the identification. Scheck and Neufeld found it to be, by far, the most common cause (52 out of 62 cases) of innocents being convicted. Some of the suggestions for improvement have to do with how lineups and photo spreads are shown to witnesses. For example, sequential rather than parallel presentation is to be preferred. Several times, in Actual Innocence, the authors cite cases of "classic cross-racial misidentifications". However their own data refutes that race is a big factor in these witnessing mistakes. A pie chart in Appendix 2 shows that in 52 cases, 55% had people of the same race making a mistake, while 36% were cross racial and in 9% the race of one of the parties is unknown.

Another issue, whose treatment bothered me, was microscopic hair analysis. Scheck and Neufeld insist that it is a scientific fraud, not good for inclusion or exclusion, that has played a part in 18 out of the 62 false convictions. They claim that mitochondrial DNA analysis can be used instead and is much more accurate. If I am not mistaken, mitochondrial DNA analysis might not be able to distinguish between siblings or cousins whose maternal line back to Eve becomes identical after a few generations. They give examples to show that there are many incompetents doing microscopic hair analysis and testifying about the results in court, but no references to scientific studies that refute the entire subject. But in Chapter 10 they are very upset when a prosecutor deprecated a Negroid pubic hair, found in a white rape victim's bed. A hair analyst had testified that its microscopic characteristics were not that of the defendant's pubic hairs. The prosecutor had come up with some explanations like, perhaps the victim had transported it to her bed by using a public rest room, or the sheet was laundered at a public laundry, or blacks had lived in the apartment 6 months before. In other words, the same kind of nonsense used by defense lawyers to explain away trace evidence when it implicates their client. As a matter of fact, there were three such pubic hairs to explain. However, the prosecution had implied that there was only one and the defense seems not to have known that fact. But who cares, if such hair analysis can't be trusted? In this case it was later verified by DNA testing.

Actual Innocence scores its best points on the remedies for problems caused by false identification, false confessions and jailhouse snitches. I find it less convincing on the structural and procedural problems in the US legal system. Its solution to inadequate legal representation for indigent defendants is to pay public defenders as much as prosecutors. Concerning the perverse verdicts of juries, they only offer this naive utterance from one of their unjustly convicted clients:

"Jurors should get innocence training". <They need to be told> "'You're doing this because we have to find the truth. The police haven't found the truth. The district attorney hasn't found the truth. Only you can.'"

After the Louise Woodward trial, Scheck suggested that a jury of experts should judge such a complicated scientific case. Nothing that politically incorrect, is uttered in Actual Innocence. (By the way, there is no mention of either Woodward or OJ Simpson in the book, even on the dust jacket). The distinguished American judge and law professor, Richard Posner, wrote about the truth finding capabilities of the American criminal justice system (Times of London Literary Supplement, Feb. 7, 1999), "It has become commonplace that an innocent person has a better chance of acquittal in a European than in an American court, and a guilty person, a better chance of acquittal in an American than in a European court".

The reader of Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer would be well served by reading the book, Posner was reviewing, "Trials Without Truth" by William T. Pizzi, ISBN 0814766498. It addresses the general problem of truth finding in the American criminal justice system, a problem that Actual Innocence hardly confronts.

Rating:
Summary: Title Limits Discussion
Review: The title of Actual Innocence limits the discussion to people wrongfully convicted. It points to police, prosecutorial and witness error or outright fabrication as an argument to do away with the death penalty. While the book is a good argument, it fails to mention the other part of the issue that makes it so difficult. The fabrications of lawyers to get their clients off no matter the cost to society or life and limb.

Police departments all over the country (US) hire men and women with moderate intelligence. It's important to do that so you don't find yourself retraining new officers all the time as the more intelligent people get bored or discusted with the whole thing and move on.

So now you get some very intelligent lawyers accusing police officers, witness', and anyone else that says their client is a murderer or child molester, to prove the real bad guys are the prosecutors and those helping them. The picture on the back of this book is telling, with Neufeld and Dwyer obviously apart from Scheck. It's also telling that OJ didn't make it into the book. After all, wasn't he actually innocent, Barry?

Barry Scheck heralds DNA testing in this book, in spite of his argument in other court cases that DNA testing is worthless, as in the OJ trial.

When law enforcement, courts and the public see this kind of abuse of the legal system, people like Scheck are as much to blame for the problems he brings up in his book as are the failures of the system or the ineptitude of many people in law enforcement. Not to mention the cop or prosecutor that commits a crime to make a conviction happen unlawfully.

Seems to me that none of the lawyers that do this kind of thing ever get punished either.

Overall, the book has value, it makes naive people think and perhaps it will help make changes in the system that will make it better. If someone is to be convicted of a crime, we have a duty to make sure it is the right person. We also have a duty to make sure that people that murder little children are not left alive to walk the streets at some future date.

Rating:
Summary: How DNA testing is freeing the wrongfully convicted
Review: The worse thing our judicial system can do is to convict an innocent person. It's not merely that an innocent person goes to jail, or even that the real criminal is free to commit more crimes (although such things are horrible), but, more significantly, it is through such actions that our faith in the law, which is the basis of society, is destroyed. Whenever those in the judicial system-prosecutors, police, investigators, judge or jurors-compromise themselves by bending the law or fudging the evidence or their perception of the truth to get a phony conviction (as is vividly described on these pages) then we have moved a step closer to the repressive and terrorist regimes of the likes of Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin. If the innocent have no more chance of happiness than the guilty, then our faith in the system will erode and society will collapse. Messrs. Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer understand this profound truth and that is one of the reasons they fought so hard to overturn wrongful convictions and to report on them in this book.

Some of this is strong stuff. You'll read of crime labs so filthy and disorganized that they are incapable of processing evidence, and of forensic "scientists" so corrupt and incompetent that they present false or invented evidence in court. You'll read of police and prosecutors who ignore the truth in order to convict the innocent and of judges who turn their backs on the rule of law because of prejudice or political ambition or just to satisfy the blood lust of a mob mentality. Some of those wrongfully convicted have spent decades in prison and have had their lives torn apart.

If we believe, as some of the hardened, cynical police officers, prosecutors and judges in this book (and elsewhere) do indeed believe, that it doesn't matter if we compromise the truth a little to get a conviction because the guy is probably guilty of something else anyway-if we believe THAT, we will become that which we despise, and the jungle of bestiality will be upon us.

The question therefore arises, why are there people in the judicial system (the scandal in the Rampart Division of the LAPD comes freshly to mind) who lie and plant phony evidence in order to get convictions? Part of it is the strain of the job and the environment in which law enforcement people exist. They become corrupted by their surroundings. They become cynical and take on the coloring of those around them. They adopt the methods of criminals. They see horrible crimes everyday and in their frustration to convict somebody, they lie and compromise themselves. And then, once they have compromised themselves, they spiral deeper and deeper into lawlessness, feeling all the time that it is "us or them."

What is the solution? Eternal vigilance, of course, and the authors are doing their part in that. But also, I think, we need to amend some of the rules. Jailhouse snitches should never be allowed to testify in court. We must have strong independent oversight of the police, not in the sense that the police will be afraid to do their jobs, but in the sense that nothing they do is secret from society. We must recognize that their job is a tough one, but we must be ready to clean house when it is necessary (and it will be necessary). Those accused of a crime should have legal representation as competent as that in the district attorney's office. In fact I think that all lawyers should have to spend some time both prosecuting and defending the accused, and that money should play no part in who represents whom. High priced lawyers should be required to not only take on pro bono cases (which many do as a matter of principle), but to prosecute some of the time as well. And district attorneys should be required to defend cases as well as prosecuting them. The adversarial system probably cannot be avoided, but if the players are forced to assume from time to time positions on both sides of the aisle, I think some of the inbred corruption can be eliminated.

No system is ever going to be perfect. When a horrendous crime is committed, we want nothing more than to find who did it and punish that person severely. That is human nature. But we must guard against letting our blood lust so cloud our judgement that we end up punishing the poor and the weak and people we don't like.

So hurrah for this book and the light it sheds on how the new forensic tool of DNA testing is helping us separate the guilty from the actually innocent. And yes, Barry and Peter, you are forgiven for helping a certain very sad person avoid the slammer. [words, 809; characters, 3779]

Rating:
Summary: Wake-up NOW!
Review: There are two messages in this book. The first is that there are innocent people in prison, some of whom can be and have been cleared due to the use of DNA testing. In addition to naming the degenerate prosecutors who insist on keeping the wrongly convicted in prison or on death row, the authors also name various defense attorney goofballs. The reader cannot avoid the conclusion that the states have executed innocent people and, unless changes are made, probably will again. The second message of the book is to those who most influence the development of the law, namely judges and law professors. The message is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the trial process. Scientists are proving that the trial and its procedures, rules of evidence, presumtions etc. do not produce trustworthy results. The legal profession and the law schools can be arrogantly dissmissive or they can spearhead enlightened rational changes.

Rating:
Summary: Wake-up NOW!
Review: There are two messages in this book. The first is that there are innocent people in prison, some of whom can be and have been cleared due to the use of DNA testing. In addition to naming the degenerate prosecutors who insist on keeping the wrongly convicted in prison or on death row, the authors also name various defense attorney goofballs. The reader cannot avoid the conclusion that the states have executed innocent people and, unless changes are made, probably will again. The second message of the book is to those who most influence the development of the law, namely judges and law professors. The message is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the trial process. Scientists are proving that the trial and its procedures, rules of evidence, presumtions etc. do not produce trustworthy results. The legal profession and the law schools can be arrogantly dissmissive or they can spearhead enlightened rational changes.

Rating:
Summary: A Crucial Message
Review: There is no more crucial time to read this book. The authors detail their work with DNA evidence in wrongful conviction cases through the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York. Typically, these are criminal cases which were tried prior to the type of DNA technology we currently possess. What this book brings to light though, is that for every conviction where actual innocence is later proven via DNA evidence, there are likely countless more situations of wrongful conviction where such evidence does not exist. Wrongful conviction is a serious problem in our criminal justice system today, as the State of Illinois demonstrates. Since reinstituting the death penalty, Illinois has executed twelve people and has released seventeen from death row due to later findings of actual innocence. Scheck's work is impressive and necessary, and this book offers an excellent portrayal of it.