In a very close decision, the US Supreme Court took the unusual step of overruling the Court of Appeals and granting a deathrow inmate the opportunity to raise new claims of actual innocence through habeas corpus proceedings that the lower court ruled were precluded under existing legal doctrine. Prisoners in such cases are required to make a huge and virtually impossible showing in order to get this type of relief, and even the court majority called it “the rare case”. Justices Roberts, Scalia and Thomas dissented and Alito did not participate, making it a 5-3 decision (that probably would have been 5-4 had Alito participated - just a guess). The case is House v. Bell.

But I think something more important is going on here. The groundswell of public opinion is being felt on the issue of wrongful convictions of innocent people and the role that DNA can play in setting them free. Movies like After Innocence and the outstanding work of the Innocence Project are keeping this issue in the limelight, and it can’t help but ultimately create a national trend of awareness that, yes, innocent people really do get convicted and, in some cases, executed. The pervasiveness of DNA testing and the growing number of resulting exonerations, along with the CSI effect as a result of people being saturated with high tech crime shows glorifying forensics, all add up to an inescapable responsibility of the Court to Do the Right Thing.

Hope and expect to see more of this to come.

Read the Supreme Court opinion here.

RP

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 9:40 am and is filed under Cool Science, News, DNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.