The Exoneration of U. S. Prisoners
By James Donahue
As a retired news reporter who spent much of his time working with police and the courts I have been fascinated by recent advancements in criminology and forensic science. Because of special new techniques involving human facial recognition, fingerprints and massive parallel sequencing of DNA the nation’s criminal justice system has some amazing new tools for tracking and convicting the bad guys.
But in the course of this new criminal research a special team called the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) has been discovering more and more cases where innocent people have been locked behind bars for crimes they did not commit. This has been especially troublesome among death row prisoners.
A recent article by Patricio Munoz-Hernandez in in The Advocate, published by the Santa Clara University School of Law in California, notes that the exoneration of wrongly convicted prisoners increased from 24 when exonerations were first recorded in 1989 to 164 in 2018. This increase was largely due to the fact that the number of CIU teams increased from eight to 44 during that short stretch of time. Over 2,500 prisoners have been found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes since CIU research began.
Munoz-Hernandez credited the promotion of additional CIU units to Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen in 2011. Rosen, who headed one of the larger legal teams in Northern California, became a nationally-recognized leader in criminal justice reform.
The article also offered this sobering statistic: “Out of 151 exonerations that occurred in 2018 at least 105 involved some degree of official misconduct, the majority of which pertained to homicide and drug-related offenses, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations.”
He wrote that a common example of misconduct involved police or prosecutors concealing evidence that might have questioned guilt. “In such cases, misconduct may include police officers threatening witnesses, forensic analysts falsifying test results and child welfare workers pressuring children to claim sexual abuse where none occurred,” Munoz-Hernandez added.
That the increased number of working CIU units is uncovering more and more cases of wrongful conviction scream for ever-intensified work in this field and a heightened awareness of the need for more careful research by investigating officers and workers in the forensic field before convicting possible felons.
One cannot imagine the horror we might experience if unexpected events lead to our arrest and conviction for a crime we had nothing to do with.
By James Donahue
As a retired news reporter who spent much of his time working with police and the courts I have been fascinated by recent advancements in criminology and forensic science. Because of special new techniques involving human facial recognition, fingerprints and massive parallel sequencing of DNA the nation’s criminal justice system has some amazing new tools for tracking and convicting the bad guys.
But in the course of this new criminal research a special team called the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) has been discovering more and more cases where innocent people have been locked behind bars for crimes they did not commit. This has been especially troublesome among death row prisoners.
A recent article by Patricio Munoz-Hernandez in in The Advocate, published by the Santa Clara University School of Law in California, notes that the exoneration of wrongly convicted prisoners increased from 24 when exonerations were first recorded in 1989 to 164 in 2018. This increase was largely due to the fact that the number of CIU teams increased from eight to 44 during that short stretch of time. Over 2,500 prisoners have been found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes since CIU research began.
Munoz-Hernandez credited the promotion of additional CIU units to Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen in 2011. Rosen, who headed one of the larger legal teams in Northern California, became a nationally-recognized leader in criminal justice reform.
The article also offered this sobering statistic: “Out of 151 exonerations that occurred in 2018 at least 105 involved some degree of official misconduct, the majority of which pertained to homicide and drug-related offenses, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations.”
He wrote that a common example of misconduct involved police or prosecutors concealing evidence that might have questioned guilt. “In such cases, misconduct may include police officers threatening witnesses, forensic analysts falsifying test results and child welfare workers pressuring children to claim sexual abuse where none occurred,” Munoz-Hernandez added.
That the increased number of working CIU units is uncovering more and more cases of wrongful conviction scream for ever-intensified work in this field and a heightened awareness of the need for more careful research by investigating officers and workers in the forensic field before convicting possible felons.
One cannot imagine the horror we might experience if unexpected events lead to our arrest and conviction for a crime we had nothing to do with.