If you're in the mood for doing some serious thinking about what might be wrong with our criminal justice system and what if anything to do about it, here's some hot-off-the-presses material worth spending some time with:
Family's life Unravels with Claims Dad Raped Daughter, is the first of a 6-part series Detroit Free Press about the case of a West Bloomfield man arrested and jailed on charges that he abused his autistic daughter.
Faces of Failing Public Defense: Portraits of Michigan's Constitutional Crisis (PDF), by the ACLU, ACLU of Michigan, and the Campaign For Justice, tells the story of 13 people in MIchigan tried and convicted for crimes they did not commit and draws connections to Michigan's much-criticized system of public defense.
Wrongful Convictions: How many innocent Americans are behind bars?, Radley Balko in Reason Magazine checks into an ongoing debate about the magnitude of the wrongful conviction problem in the U.S. Leading voices in that debate are U of M Law professor Sam Gross, expounding the view that wrongful convictions are far more common than generally assumed, and Joshua Marquis, the district attorney for Clatsop County, Oregon, who is an outspoken critic of the Innocence Project. Balko comes down on Gross's side:
Whatever the total number of innocent convicts, there is good reason to believe that the 268 cases in which DNA evidence has proven innocence don’t begin to scratch the surface. For one thing, the pace of these exonerations hasn’t slowed down: There were 22 in 2009, making it the second busiest name-clearing year to date. Furthermore, exonerations are expensive in both time and resources. Merely discovering a possible case and requesting testing often isn’t enough. With some commendable exceptions (see “Bad Boys,” page 58), prosecutors tend to fight requests for post-conviction DNA testing. (The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2009 that there is no constitutional right to such tests.) So for now, the pace of genetic exonerations appears to be limited primarily by the amount of money and staff that legal advocacy groups have to uncover these cases and argue them in court, the amount of evidence available for testing, and the willingness of courts to allow the process to happen, not by a lack of cases in need of further investigation.
It’s notable that one of the few places in America where a district attorney has specifically dedicated staff and resources to seeking out bad convictions—Dallas County, Texas—has produced more exonerations than all but a handful of states. That’s partly because Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is more interested in reopening old cases than his counterparts elsewhere, and partly because of a historical quirk: Since the early 1980s the county has been sending biological crime scene evidence to a private crime lab for testing, and that lab has kept the evidence well preserved. Few states require such evidence be preserved once a defendant has exhausted his appeals, and in some jurisdictions the evidence is routinely destroyed at that point.
