William Fisher

NEW YORK, Aug 12 2005 (IPS) — The work of the Innocence Project is a "good news, bad news" story.

The good news is that as of Aug. 11, 161 wrongfully convicted people have walked out of prison on the basis of DNA evidence. Of these, 14 were on death row, though not all of them were freed by the Innocence Project.

The bad news is that sometimes exoneration comes too late.

The Innocence Project is a not-for-profit legal clinic established at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City in 1992. It investigates and presents cases where post-conviction DNA testing of evidence can yield conclusive proof of innocence. Law students handle casework, supervised by a team of attorneys and clinic staff.

One of its founders is Barry C. Scheck, who is widely remembered as the lawyer whose presentation of DNA evidence helped acquit football star O.J. Simpson of his wife’s murder in 1995. The co-founder is lawyer Peter J. Neufeld.

Most of its clients are poor, forgotten, and have exhausted all other legal avenues for relief. Thousands currently await our evaluation of their cases.

Today, there are Innocence Projects in most U.S. states. The Innocence Network, a group of law schools, journalism schools, and public defender offices across the country, assists inmates trying to prove their innocence whether or not the cases involve biological evidence which can be subjected to DNA testing.

Its "good news" achievements are impressive.

On Aug. 1, Thomas Doswell was released from prison after serving 19 years. In 1986, he was convicted in 1986 of rape, criminal attempt, simple assault, terrorist threats, and unlawful restraint. Post-conviction DNA testing in 2005 conclusively proved that Doswell could not have committed the crime.

On Aug. 3, Luis Diaz was released from Florida prison after serving 25 years. Diaz was convicted in 1980 as the "Bird Road Rapist." Between 1977 and 1979, over 25 women were attacked in the Bird Road area of Coral Gables, Florida. Diaz was arrested and charged with eight rapes. In 2005, after 26 years protesting his innocence, post-conviction DNA testing provided proof that Diaz was wrongfully convicted.

Michael Anthony Williams was 16 years old when he was arrested and convicted of rape. In March of this year, he walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He had spent 24 years in prison before post-conviction DNA testing proved he was innocent.

The Innocence Project says many of the overturned convictions are obtained through false confessions – involved in 33 of the first 123 post-conviction DNA exonerations.

Among the better-known cases in this category is the 1989 Central Park Jogger Case in New York City, in which a young woman was raped and brutally beaten.

Five young men were convicted of the crime. But DNA testing corroborated the confession of another man, who said he acted alone and that he did not know the five men who were convicted.

The five, teenagers at the time, were picked up by police following a chaotic night in Central Park, marked by violence and what was termed "wilding". Each gave a detailed videotaped statement minimising his own involvement in the crime but implicating the others.

What the jury did not see were the tactics used to elicit these statements, one of which came after more than 24 hours of interrogation. Their accounts varied greatly, but their confessions were used to convict all five men.

In 2002, A New York judge dismissed the convictions after the prosecutor cited new DNA evidence that implicated a convicted rapist who had confessed to the assault, although lawyers from the police detectives’ union unsuccessfully tried to block the decision.

By that time, however, all five had served years in prison.

Most would consider that bad news enough. But worse news comes when new evidence is not merely post-conviction, but post-execution.

The possibility that an innocent man was executed a decade ago in Missouri has been raised by the St. Louis city circuit attorney, after a year-long investigation by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In an extremely rare move, the prosecutor has ordered a new investigation into the case against Larry Griffin, who was executed by lethal injection in 1995.

The case began in 1980 with what the cops painted as a classic criminal perfecta: a drug-related, drive-by, revenge shooting in the slums. It involved the shooting of a man by gunmen in a slowly passing car in an assault that killed a drug dealer in June 1980.

One of the shooters, according to prosecutors, the jury and the Missouri Supreme Court, over the vigorous dissent of one justice, was Larry Griffin, a man with a criminal past.

But the court never heard testimony from a crucial eyewitness whose exculpatory testimony might have saved Griffin. That eyewitness, now living in California, says Griffin was not a shooter. The case is still under investigation.

The work of the Innocence Project has drawn approval from many involved in the criminal justice system.

Typical is Brian J. Foley, who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville.

Prof. Foley told IPS, "The Innocence Project helps improve the whole criminal justice system by providing a set of wrongful convictions we can study to see what went wrong, the way investigators look at air crashes."

"So, if DNA reveals that the person convicted absolutely didn’t commit the crime, then we know that the eyewitness identification, or the confession, or both, were wrong," he said. "We can study how that evidence was obtained and how it was used at trial and learn from that. Over the long run, the project will have helped us improve our system’s accuracy more than anything else I can think of."

The project has also sparked initiatives throughout the U.S. for judicial reforms, particularly in death penalty cases. In 2002, then Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois called a moratorium on all executions and created a special Commission on Capital Punishment.

In June of this year, members of the California State Assembly introduced legislation to suspend all executions in California until Jan. 1, 2009 while the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice conducts a thorough study of the state’s criminal justice procedures.

And Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has recently weighed in on the administration of capital punishment, declaring he was disturbed by "serious flaws." Stevens stopped short of calling for an end to the death penalty, but he said there are many problems in the way it is used. Recent exonerations of death row inmates through scientific evidence are significant, he told the American Bar Association, "not only because of its relevance to the debate about the wisdom of continuing to administer capital punishment, but also because it indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice."

Other Supreme Court justices, including the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have also spoken out about concerns that defendants in murder cases are not adequately represented at trial.

In its last term, the high court overturned the death sentences of four inmates and ruled that states cannot put to death killers who were younger than 18 at the time of the crime.