What has DNA taught us about wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project?
As of January 2022, DNA testing had exonerated 375 people in the US since 1989, and the same few causes keep appearing.
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It has shown, case by case, that innocent people can be convicted of serious crimes, and that the causes come up again and again. As of January 2022, 375 people in the United States who had been convicted of serious crimes had been by DNA testing since 1989, 21 of them sentenced to death.
The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by the attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, as part of a law clinic at Cardozo law school. It is a that uses DNA testing and other routes to free prisoners it believes have been wrongly convicted. It focuses exclusively on cases where DNA evidence can be tested or retested, and DNA testing is possible in only 5 to 10% of criminal cases.
What went wrong in those 375 cases? The Innocence Project's DNA exonerations identified several contributors: mistaken eyewitness identifications, invalid forensic science, false confessions, who lied, and government misconduct. The Innocence Project says that 44% of result from faulty forensic analysis.
The same tests also work the other way. In about 40% of DNA exoneration cases, law enforcement officials identified the actual perpetrator from the same test results that cleared the wrong person.
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Recap
DNA can undo a conviction, but it can be tested in only 5 to 10% of criminal cases, so the counts are a floor, not a total.
💡 A trick to remember it · DNA exonerations are the tip of an iceberg: only the cases with a testable sample can float up.
Surprising fact · In about 40% of DNA exoneration cases, officials identified the actual perpetrator from the same DNA results.
Connects to
- 👪 Is it fair for police to search DNA databases for a suspect's relatives?
- ⚖️ What is the prosecutor's fallacy, and how did it affect the Sally Clark case?
- 🦷 Why were bite-mark and hair comparisons discredited as forensic evidence?
- ⚖️ Why is a suspect treated as innocent until proven guilty?
- 👁️ Can thousands of eyewitnesses get it wrong?
- Rule of law
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (14 claims) cites at least one of these.