The Innocence Project has aided in the exoneration of nearly 300 wrongfully imprisoned individuals. The average time each of those people spent in jail is 13 years.
Eyewitness misidentification has been the leading contributing factor for wrongful imprisonment in the US. In total, 75% of the 292 people exonerated through overturned convictions have been set free because of DNA testing that proved the subjective, highly-malleable memory of a witness to be false.
Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld formed the Innocence Project in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City. Their goal was to free those wrongfully convicted and imprisoned of crimes through DNA testing, a technology that is only 26-years-old. It has slowly emerged as the most reliable physical evidence at a crime scene. This is particularly true for cases that involve sexual assault.
Prior to the—and this cannot be overstated—gargantuan introduction of DNA testing to murder and sexual assault trials, witness and victim identification was the most common and significant way in which guilty verdicts were reached.
“The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true,” said Jonah Lehrer in an article published in an April 2012 issue of the Wall Street Journal. “Although our recollections seem like literal snapshots of the past, they’re actually deeply flawed reconstructions, a set of stories constantly undergoing rewrites.”
The US Judicial System has demonstrated that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. There needs to be a careful, objective preservation of human memory and its ductile nature needs to be curbed.
Often, during the standard police lineup, positive feedback from a police officer will increase a witness’ confidence in picking a suspect out of a lineup. The officer, whether it is a conscious maneuver or not, shows a proclivity towards displaying positive body language when the suspected perpetrator is keyed in on by a witness. Witnesses also tend to compare individuals in a lineup to one another and try to rationalize the culprit is present in order to arrive at a conclusion instead of comparing each person in the lineup individually to the face embedded in their memory. Experts believe that a sequential double-blind administration, in which a third party who isn’t a member of the investigating team and is unaware of the suspect’s identity presents the lineup is an important step towards gaining the most from eyewitness identification. In a sequential double-blind administration the witness is informed of the administrator’s lack of knowledge and, instead of being presented with a group of lineup photos all at once, is shown each a photo of one individual at a time to avoid the tendency of the witness to compare photos and gauge which photo presents the best fit.
Other reforms to try to decrease the number of wrongful convictions include recording the identification procedure, a proper lineup composition in which fillers should resemble the eyewitness’ description of the perpetrator so the suspect doesn’t stand out.
In many jurisdictions, officials also have refused to enable inmates to have evidence tested using modern DNA testing methods, arguing that this would reopen too many old cases. The general public seems to disagree with this sentiment. According to the American Civil Liberties and Union, a Gallup Poll conducted in March of 2002 showed that 92-percent of Americans say that those convicted before the technology was available should be given the opportunity to submit to DNA tests now on the chance that those tests might show their innocence.
Experts estimate that less than ten percent of all criminal cases involve biological evidence that could be subjected to DNA testing, Paul Cates, Communications Director of the Innocence Project explained. These are samples of blood, semen, saliva, hair, etc. DNA basically is the tip of the iceberg. The criminal justice system also relies on other kinds of evidence, including confessions, forensic science, and government misconduct. All of these are a generally unreliable way to gauge the innocence or guilt of a defendant. For example, many defendants are forced into false confessions because they are coerced, feel threatened, or mentally impaired and therefore unable to defend themselves sufficiently.
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