Miscarriages of Justice
First published Jan. 14, 2007 in The Patriot News
Despite the political rifts ripping through our nation, most reasonable people hold two fundamental beliefs about our criminal justice system: The guilty should be held accountable, and the innocent should not be punished.
However, for many years, a substantial percentage of the public refused to acknowledge that, at times, innocent people were wrongfully convicted. Relatively recent advances in the analysis and use of DNA evidence have helped establish that mistakes have happened, and innocent people have been convicted and sentenced for crimes they did not commit. This put to rest any debate over whether such a miscarriage of justice might occur.
Today, some spend their time speculating about how many have been wrongfully convicted and debate the scope of the problem. That debate cannot be won with hard evidence. In most cases, DNA is not available to establish conclusively whether someone is guilty. Instead, we should evaluate how best to secure the kind of justice system we all believe in: one in which the guilty are convicted and the innocent are freed.
Step one should be a careful examination of every case that resulted in a wrongful conviction to determine what flaws in the system caused the miscarriage of justice. Pennsylvania’s Senate Judiciary Committee is taking steps to do that with the creation of an advisory panel on wrongful convictions, of which I will be a part.
It is important that all interested groups be represented in this stage, including law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, scientists and judges. Generally, when a mishap occurs in our society, authorities investigate what went wrong. When a plane or train crashes, we see federal investigators on the scene almost immediately. Why? Simply to avoid, if possible, another crash under similar circumstances.
However, with the exception of a few states, such as North Carolina and Pennsylvania, there is no mandated investigation to determine what went wrong when we discover a person has been wrongfully convicted. If examinations were undertaken in each state, we would undoubtedly discover wrongful convictions caused by 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.
Step two would bring the best minds in science and other relevant disciplines to the table for a discussion about how to address each systemic flaw. The Arlin M. Adams Center for Law and Society at Susquehanna University will bring several of these minds to campus on Feb. 1 for the public presentation "Wrongful Convictions: Causing Pain, Allowing Gain."
In the specialized and technically savvy world of the 21st century, there are far greater pools of expertise to address these problems than there were in years past. We cannot afford to leave anyone out of this endeavor who may add to our insight and support our efforts.
When a crime has been committed and an innocent person held accountable, 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, the courts and the correctional system are needlessly taxed. And the victim learns that reliving the offense on the witness stand was for naught, and will have to be repeated if the actual perpetrator is prosecuted.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of apprehending the actual perpetrator is significantly 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 is uncovered, the public's trust in the justice system diminishes.
Therefore, rather than reading about the most recent wrongful conviction in the newspaper and scratching our heads about how the system can fail to do justice, we must view the advent of DNA 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, especially to those who were
victimized as a result of past practices.
Allan Sobel is director of the Arlin M. Adams Center for Law and Society at Susquehanna University.
