If Only Sam Sheppard had known about DNA …
United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once said:
It’s better that ten guilty men go free, than for one man to be unjustly imprisoned.
If we really believe that, then we’ve got a lot of guilty folks to let out of prison. For those who still don’t believe that completely innocent people are sometimes wrongfully convicted, sentenced, and even put to death, consider the current running count over at The Innocence Project, the non-profit legal team founded by Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld. These two New York lawyers fought long odds to introduce DNA as a tool that could be used not only to prove guilt, but also to establish innocence to a scientific certainty. As of the date of this writing, the count is up to 163. That’s right, one-hundred sixty-three men, as innocent of their crimes as you and I, were tried, convicted and sentenced, and but for the efforts of the Innocence Project teams and the availability of physical evidence amenable to DNA testing, they would still be sitting in prison rotting away their lives wondering what on earth went wrong.
And that’s just the ones that Barry Sheck’s team has so far managed to clear. They have thousands of applications pending from sorry individuals who’ve been locked away in many cases for decades, insisting on their innocence. I haven’t seen anyone attempt to do the math on this, but if one were to extrapolate from the percentage of cases revealed so far, and factor in all the wrongful conviction cases that will never be reversed because of a lack of any DNA evidence to test, and then factor in all the applications that Barry’s team will simply never get to, logistically, the emerging picture would be staggering. The truth is, it appears that we do in fact wrongfully convict many. Fortunately, people like Barry will continue to try and undo whatever damage can still be undone (i.e., those not yet executed or otherwise “freed”), and to try and minimize the likelihood that it will continue to happen.
Barry’s an amazing man. I had the pleasure of watching him preside this last year as President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and watched him barely able to compose himself as he announced the imminent release of yet another one of his clients at our annual meeting in Portland earlier in the year. One hundred sixty three men, and he still breaks down at the thought of one more exoneration. But you know, I’m sure he’ll continue to feel the same after two hundred, and three hundred, and four hundred.
RP