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

4 An Unmet Obligation

An Unmet Obligation It is difficult to confront the deficiencies of the criminal justice process that can send innocent people to prison or allow the guilty to roam free without feeling compelled to prevent future errors from occurring . Whether we identify with the innocent suspect, who is convicted and left to serve time for a crime he did not commit; the helpless victim, who is attacked by a criminal who should have been locked up; the police officer or prosecutor, who errantly is convinced of a case he later comes to doubt; or the taxpayer, who must pay for the costs of convicting the innocent, it is both good public policy and common human decency to wish to eliminate wrongful convictions. As the last chapter argued, however, it is virtually impossible to eradicate erroneous convictions, for these cases share many features with others in which errors are caught or offset by other convincing, exculpatory evidence. But it is possible to reduce the rate by which errors occur in the criminal justice system or the likelihood that questionable evidence will find its way into a criminal prosecution. In doing so, the justice system not only will further protect the civil liberties of suspects, but it also will bring the latest and best practices to justice professionals. Everyone has an interest in adopting the most advanced practices to investigate and prosecute cases, and indeed a number of justice officials have taken the lead in investigating wrongful convictions and responding to their causes. As Samuel Walker noted in his book A Critical History of Police Reform, policing in the twentieth century embraced a new model of professionalism in which officers saw themselves not simply as crime fighters but also as upholders of the law. Prosecutors, too, are held to the professional and ethical canons of law, which consider attorneys to be officers of the court rather than mere pugilists seeking to win their cases. The impressive list of justice officials who have been involved in the investigation, consideration, and reversal of erroneous convictions, therefore, should not be surprising: Thomas Sullivan, a for4 132 mer U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who cochaired Governor Ryan’s Commission in Illinois; I. Beverly Lake, chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, who inaugurated his state’s Actual Innocence Commission; Robert Olson, the former police chief of Minneapolis , who has been a leader in reforming interrogation techniques; and Judge William S. Sessions, former director of the FBI, who, among other roles, has served as an advisory board member for the Innocence Commission for Virginia. With the guidance of Judge Sessions and the other members of its diverse advisory board, the ICVA took aim at the principal sources for the erroneous convictions in Virginia that its investigation had uncovered. After considerable consultation and research, the ICVA issued a series of recommendations to address these factors and reduce the likelihood that such errors would lead to more mistaken convictions. Although each of the sources is itself problematic, the ICVA concentrated much of its energy on three leading reforms: increasing the accuracy of eyewitness identification, improving the reliability of interrogation proceedings , and providing postconviction remedies for erroneous convictions. Eyewitness Identification There is little doubt that an eyewitness’s identification is one of the most powerful tools available to police officers and prosecutors. In fact, a “positive id” can often seal the fate of a suspect long before going to trial. As the ICVA report stated: A defendant who chooses to go to trial despite being identified as the perpetrator faces an uphill and daunting battle, for judges, juries, and the public place overwhelming weight on the testimony of eyewitnesses and victims of crime when they point to a defendant in court and state: “That is the person who committed this crime.” Nonetheless, eyewitness identification can be problematic. Nationwide , nearly 75 percent of the more than one hundred DNA exonerations have involved mistaken eyewitness identification.1 In Virginia, nine of the eleven cases investigated by the ICVA revealed problems with eyewitness identification. Marvin Anderson, for example, was convicted largely on the testimony of the victim, who had initially identified An Unmet Obligation | 133 him in a suggestive photo array in which his was the only color photograph . Jeffrey Cox, too, was imprisoned in a case that relied heavily on...