A press conference will be held in New York today heralding the introduction of a much needed legislative reform package that will help reduce the number of wrongful convictions. From the Innocence Project's press release (no link, received by e-mail):

The sweeping legislative package includes fundamental reforms – including access to post-conviction DNA testing, preservation of evidence that can prove innocence, mechanisms for people to prove their innocence by using forensic databases that can identify true perpetrators of crimes, the formation of a state Innocence Commission and others.

Image from the Innocent Project.

Jerry Miller has been ordered released from jail after serving 25 years for a rape DNA has shown he didn't commit.

Miller is the 200th person shown by DNA evidence to have been wrongfully convicted.

The Innocence Project says,

The 100th exoneration occurred in January 2002, 13 years after the first exoneration. It took just more than five years for the number to double.

"Five years ago, people said that the number (of exonerations) was going to dry up because there just weren't many wrongful convictions," said lawyer Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project in 1992 to help prisoners prove their innocence through DNA evidence. "But clearly, there are plenty of innocent persons still in prison. There's no way you can look at this data without believing that."

David Lazer, a Harvard University public policy professor who specializes in DNA issues, says improved testing technology and an increase in the number of lawyers who are taking on DNA cases should result in a continued increase in the number of wrongful convictions that are set aside.

In light of all the evidence that wrongful convictions are a serious and systemic problem in our criminal justice system (including the conviction of Timothy Atkins, who served 20 years for a murder he didn't commit), one would think prosecutors would desire to fix the errors that lead to wrongful convictions. Why don't they?

One reason change is unlikely is the pressure to win. Successful prosecutors win convictions. Fairness? It's a desirable quality, but to some an unaffordable luxury when it threatens to impinge on a conviction.

Konrad Moore, a supervising deputy public defender in Kern County, California, discusses how the "win at all costs" mentality is affecting (and infecting) the trial of Phil Spector at the expense of fairness.

There was so little evidence linking Jimmy Lee Page to a 1987 double homicide in Texas that jurors shook Page's hand and congratulated him after he was acquitted. Despite the acquittal, Page went back to prison. He was on parole for an unrelated homicide, and parole officials, unconstrained by the need for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, decided on the basis of a police detective's testimony that Page was guilty. His parole was revoked and he's been in prison ever since.

Seems unfair that a single governmental employee can negate the judgment of a unanimous jury, doesn't it? It is, but it happens all the time.

Last year, 91 Texas parolees were returned to prison after being charged with a new crime, even though the charges against them were later dropped or they were acquitted in court.

Anthony Capozzi is now 50 years old. He's been in prison for 22 years for a rape he didn't commit. DNA has proved his innocence and he is expected to be freed within two weeks.

DNA evidence at the time of Capozzi’s trial wasn’t even admissible in the courts, and D’Agostino had to contend with the testimony of three women who identified Capozzi as their assailant.

“Maybe one’s wrong, maybe two are wrong, but jurors sit there and say how can three people possibly be wrong?” he said. “They were all so positive it was him.”

The D.A. agrees Capozzi was wrongfully convicted.

Erie County District Attorney Frank J. Clark is expected to present Troutman DNA test results from the county’s crime lab. Those tests show that DNA in slides taken from the rape victims matches that of the man charged as the Bike Path Killer, Altemio Sanchez.

Did Gary Tyler, age 16 at the time, shoot 13-year-old Timothy Weber in Louisiana in 1975? A white mob launched a violent attack on a school bus filled with black students. Weber was hit by a bullet while standing near the bus. Tyler was on the bus, but he had no gun, and there's reason to believe that a gun that was eventually recovered from the bus (but never actually linked to the shooting) was planted long after Tyler's arrest.

Tyler is black, and he's consistently denied that he shot Weber, who was white. Race and an inept lawyer play ugly roles in the investigation and trial of Tyler's case.

Tyler was tried by an all-white jury with members of the black community deliberately excluded from jury selection. The prosecution relied mainly on the testimony of one student, Nathalie Blanks, who was in the same bus with Tyler. She testified to having seen him fire the gun but after the trial she recanted her testimony. Other students who also testified against Tyler have later recanted, saying that they were coerced by the police to making the statements.

Tyler is serving a life sentence. Amnesty International provides detailed background on the case here. Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a series of articles about the case that are available here.

What can you do? This posting at The Nation's Act Now! blog links to a petition asking Kathleen Blanco to issue a pardon, and suggests other ways you can get involved on Tyler's behalf.

Those who point to exonerations of the wrongfully convicted -- often after years or decades of incarceration -- as evidence that "the system works" are missing the point: the system often doesn't work, and the belated correction of some mistakes only serves to highlight all the errors that our criminal justice system never corrects.

With this reality in mind, the NY Times calls upon New York and Texas--

to join the half-dozen pioneering states that have created what are termed innocence commissions. These are independent investigative bodies of judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, police officers and forensic scientists who re-examine case facts after prisoners are exonerated using DNA evidence.

These respected authorities try to identify the causes of the wrongful convictions and propose changes to improve the state of justice. Calls to create commissions in New York and Texas are bogged down in statehouse politics, even as a half-dozen other states are poised to create their own monitors.

Creating an innocence commission in every state would be a useful first step toward a meaningful solution to a problem of epidemic proportions. But it is only one step among many that need to be taken.

No one knows the depth of injustice hinted at by DNA exonerations. But it is clear that they demand organized oversight and serious reforms of the criminal justice system.

Dennis Delano, a Buffalo homicide detective, thinks the police caught the wrong man when they arrested Anthony Capozzi for three sexual assaults in 1985. Delano is convinced that the crimes were committed by the Bike Path Rapist.

Delano doesn't think the rapist was Capozzi, who has a history of mental problems. Delano believes - based on numerous similarities to the Bike Path Rapist's methods - that the attacks were the early work of Altemio Sanchez.

Delano, a cop for 28 years, said, "I would bet my career on it."

These are the facts as Delano sees them:

As TalkLeft discussed here, Roy Brown was convicted of a brutal murder on the basis of dubious bite mark evidence. Fifteen years later, a DNA analysis proved that the state's bite mark expert was wrong.

A piece in today's NY Times takes a helpful look at bike mark evidence.

What happened to Mr. Brown is hardly an aberration. Prosecutors have invoked bite-mark matches to secure convictions in numerous cases, only to see these convictions overturned when DNA or other evidence has become available.

In spite of the evolution of other forensic sciences, bite-mark analysis remains an inexact tool. A 1999 study by a member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, a professional trade organization, found a 63 percent rate of false identifications.

Why do prosecutors consistently rely upon such consistently unreliable evidence?

There is, experts say, a mix of ignorance on the part of jurors and defense lawyers about the evidence’s scientific shortcomings and the overzealousness of prosecutors and their expert witnesses, who are seen as too quick to validate an unproven technique.

The Innocence Project reports that Roy Brown, the 8th New York prisoner in 13 months, will be freed from prison today because DNA testing has established his innocence.

Roy Brown solved the case from his jail cell.

“This is unlike any case we’ve ever seen. Roy Brown broke the case from his prison cell and confronted the actual perpetrator, who in turn killed himself. The true perpetrator’s courageous daughter then volunteered her own DNA sample, only to have the judge who oversaw Roy’s trial refuse to release him – saying that he had more confidence in the highly questionable practice of ‘bite-mark’ analysis than in the hard science of DNA.

Only after the true perpetrator’s body was exhumed and subjected to DNA testing did prosecutors accept the truth,” said Peter Neufeld, Co-Director of the Innocence Project. “Today, exactly 15 years after he was convicted, the truth has finally set Roy Brown free.

This is just more evidence that New York needs to establish an Innocence Commission:

Eyewitness testimony, often the worst evidence a jury can rely upon, sent Willie Williams to prison more than 21 years ago. Today he walks free, thanks to the Georgia Innocence Project, which used new DNA testing to establish that he wasn't the man who raped a woman in 1985.

The victim told the jury that she was certain of Williams' guilt. Unfortunately, the jury didn't know that the certainty of an identification doesn't correlate with accuracy. Victims typically focus their attention on guns and the trauma of the moment, not on faces. And they typically believe the police officers who assure them that the "right guy" has been arrested.

The DNA evidence was marked for destruction, and it was only by happenstance that the evidence was preserved until a 2003 Georgia law required the state to maintain DNA evidence. Every state should enact a similar law to help free people like Willie Williams from their wrongful imprisonments.

James Waller was convicted in 1982 of raping a 12 year old boy. He spent almost half his life in prison before his parole in 1993.

A court decision yesterday declared him innocent, based on DNA evidence.

Waller is the 12th exoneration in Dallas.

“Nowhere else in the nation have so many individual wrongful convictions been proven in one county in such a short span,” said Barry C. Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that championed Mr. Waller’s case. In fact, Mr. Scheck said, those 12 such instances are more than have occurred anywhere else except the entire states of New York and Illinois since the nation’s first DNA exoneration, in 1989.