Use the Gift of DNA to Improve Justice System
First published Jan. 28, 2007 in The Daily Item
Despite the deep divisions in this country over many important issues, all reasonable people agree that the guilty should be held accountable for their actions and the innocent should not be punished.
For many years in our society, a substantial percentage of the public refused to acknowledge that at times innocent people have been wrongfully convicted and punished. Relatively recent advances in the analysis and use of DNA evidence have identified cases of wrongful conviction to a certainty. In some cases of wrongful conviction, actually innocent defendants were sentenced to die for the crime they were believed to have committed. These revelations have put to rest any debate between reasonable people about whether our system of justice has produced wrongful convictions.
Today some spend their time debating the scope of the problem and speculating about how many have been wrongfully convicted. That debate cannot be won with hard evidence. In most cases DNA is not available to establish conclusively whether someone is actually guilty.
When a crime has been committed and an innocent person held accountable for it, we all suffer. The actual perpetrator remains free to commit additional crimes. The innocent person, and his or her family and friends, are traumatized. The resources of the police, prosecutors, the courts and the correctional system are needlessly taxed. The victim learns that reliving the experience on the witness stand was for naught and will have to be repeated if the actual perpetrator is apprehended and charged. Unfortunately, the likelihood of holding the actual perpetrator accountable is greatly reduced over time. Cases grow cold, witnesses die or become difficult to locate, and physical evidence may be lost or destroyed. And, if and when the wrongful conviction comes to public attention, public trust and confidence in our law enforcement and courts is diminished.
With the window of opportunity created by DNA technology, we must devote our resources to an examination of the known wrongful convictions for the purpose of learning what went wrong so that we may consider how to prevent similar miscarriages of justice. Isn't this the only reasonable response by a society that cares about justice for all? When a plane or train crashes in our great country, in an effort to prevent another crash for the same reasons, a group of government experts is immediately dispatched to the scene in an effort to learn precisely what went wrong. Is sentencing an innocent person to prison or death any less a tragedy that should be prevented if at all possible?
Each case should be carefully evaluated by a group of representatives from law enforcement, prosecuting attorneys, defense lawyers, judges and scientists. It is essential that these groups all be included because each has much to offer and they need to demonstrate collectively an interest in improving the sound administration of justice. This is not about partisanship. Every reasonable person wants the guilty held accountable and the innocent free.
Pennsylvania, under the leadership of Sen. Greenleaf and the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee, in establishing an advisory committee under Senate Resolution No. 381 to look at Pennsylvania's wrongful convictions, has made an important move toward securing a better justice system for its citizens. Unfortunately, such an effort is not underway in our sister states. If an examination of wrongful convictions was undertaken in each state, we would undoubtedly discover cases of the innocent convicted because of unintentional erroneous eyewitness identifications, tunnel vision in the investigation of criminal activity, expert testimony without a scientific foundation, shoddy lawyering, witnesses lying under oath, and false confessions.
After we identify the systemic flaws that have caused these mistaken results, we must bring together the best minds from the various interest groups, from science and from all other relevant disciplines to the table for a frank and open discussion about how best to address each flaw. Today's world has a much greater fund of information available to address problems than did the world in years past, and we live in a very specialized and technical environment. We cannot afford to leave anyone out of this important endeavor who may add to our insight and support our problem-solving efforts. The Arlin M. Adams Center for Law and Society at Susquehanna University will bring several of these minds together at 7 p.m. Thursday in Isaacs Auditorium, located in Siebert Hall, to discuss how science and law may work together to help us find more reliable paths to the truth. The public is invited to attend at no charge.
Rather than reading in our newspapers about the most recent discovery of a wrongful conviction and then scratching our heads wondering how the system can fail to do justice in the most serious matters that come before our courts, we must see the advent of DNA and its ability to establish actual guilt or innocence as creating a wonderful opportunity to learn from our mistakes and find ways of preventing future miscarriages of justice. To do otherwise is a further injustice to all of society, but especially to those who were personally victimized as a result of past practices.
Allan Sobel is director of the Arlin M. Adams Center for Law and Society at Susquehanna University.
