An extraordinary thing will happen Wednesday. DNA tests will clear a convicted criminal of charges for the 20th time in Dallas County, reports
The Dallas Morning News. Think about that -- 20 cases in one county in eight years.
The Dallas Morning News said:
"The county has more DNA exonerations than any other jurisdiction in the nation since 2001 when the state began allowing post-conviction DNA testing.
"Like 18 of his fellow exonerees, Evans was convicted based on eyewitness testimony. The Dallas Morning News published a series last year that showed all but one of the DNA exonerations used faulty eyewitness testimony to convict."
There may be stories in this for you.
Check with your local Innocence Project to find out how many DNA tests are still pending that could free people in your area and state.
Here is a list of the hundreds set free, sortable by name, state, year of conviction and year of exoneration.How reliable is eyewitness testimony? What do criminologists know about the factors that make it even more unreliable (e.g. cross-race identification, photo lineups, suspect lineups, when a gun is involved, when the "suspect" has already been cuffed and stuffed into a police car, when the ID occurs at night or in dim light). T
he Innocence Project Web site said:"Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing.
"While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated."
How are budget cuts affecting the public defender offices that often inherit cases involving questionable evidence?
