The Innocence Commission: Preventing Wrongful Convictions and Restoring the Criminal Justice System

Introduction

Introduction In December 2005, the ABC television network issued a press release announcing a new project to “to overturn wrongful convictions, liberate the falsely accused and discover the identity of those really to blame.”1 Rather than heralding an advocacy organization, however, ABC’s release concerned a new television series it would air, called In Justice. According to Stephen McPherson, president of ABC entertainment , the show represented a completely new take on the procedural drama. Focusing on cases of justice run amok—sloppy police work, false testimony and biased juries —the show would feature the fictitious National Justice Project, a high-profile, non-profit organization made up of hungry young associates who approach their work like a puzzle, a puzzle that’s been put together wrong.”2 In Justice lasted for only thirteen episodes, earning such pans as “cutesy,” “drab,” and “not-so-amazing” from television critics.3 Yet the show’s airing marked an important milestone, for its creation reflected a growing recognition in popular culture that the criminal justice system was capable of serious errors. Gone was the presumption found in other shows that police officers, prosecutors, and judges wear white hats. ABC’s new offering not only showed a criminal justice system that could imprison the innocent, but it also trumpeted the effort of advocates working against the odds to free convicted defendants. How did American society reach the point that a writer would feel confident pitching a series like In Justice to a television executive and that one of the nation’s major networks would crow about “modernday heroes” who represent the convicted?4 To be sure, no reasonable person doubts that the American criminal justice system is more accurate than not, but American society seems to have moved past the “get 1 tough” period of the 1980s, in which public support for punitive policies ran high and trust in the justice process was vast, to reach the present point at which people are at least receptive to evidence of error. Social scientists have identified several sources for the shift in public opinion. By the 1990s, the rising crime wave of the 1960s and early 1970s had dropped substantially; conservative politicians, who rode the public’s fear of disorder to victory in the 1980s and 1990s, had reached ascendance by 2000 and had no higher political hill to climb; and sentencing policy had become so strict that it was difficult to consider even more severe policies. Yet as important as these sources might be, there is no question that the arrival of DNA testing and the commensurate jump in factually indisputable exonerations engineered a stunning drop in public confidence about the criminal justice system. Over the span of a few years at the turn of the new century, more than one hundred innocent individuals were identified and freed from the nation’s prisons, many because of the advent of DNA testing that conclusively excluded them as suspects. Much of the credit for these exonerations goes to teams of reporters, professors, students, and pro bono attorneys who were willing to listen to the claims of innocence from imprisoned defendants and who dedicated hundreds of hours of uncompensated time to proving these men innocent. Journalism professor David Protess and his students at Northwestern University were some of the first advocates to successfully free innocent defendants. They were soon followed by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and their colleagues at the now-famous Innocence Project in New York, who effectively set the standard for postconviction representation . Indeed, ABC’s fictional National Justice Project undoubtedly had as its model the Innocence Project or Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. These groups have been frighteningly successful in their investigations , frightening only in the number of innocent defendants found to be sentenced to prison or worse. As of 2005, there were more than 340 known exonerations nationwide.5 Over a twenty-year span in Illinois, more capital convicts were released from death row because of questions about their guilt than were actually executed.6 This disquieting finding, along with shocking details of police deception reported by the Chicago Tribune,7 convinced former Illinois governor George Ryan to impose a moratorium on executions in 2000. Three years later, Ryan 2 | Introduction “emptied Illinois’ death row” by pardoning four defendants and commuting the sentences of 167 others to life in prison.8 Governor...