The American Judiciary system stands upon four fundamental concepts, namely, equal justice under the law, due process, the adversary system, presumption of innocence, thus guaranteeing a thorough, proper, and unbiased trial.

But as the saying goes, a double-edged sword cuts both ways, this extensive procedure takes a huge amount of time ranging from a few months to a few years, and in some rarest of rare cases even after the death of the victim, a judgment isn’t reached.

One would imagine that such an extensive procedure would not leave behind room for doubts or miscarriage of justice leading to an innocent being charged by law.

But a country like the USA having the largest Forensic science facility in the world (FBI, Virginia), has often had cases that are related to wrongful convictions and it is to this extent that it has become a fact of life for US Judicial system. 

The actual incidence of wrongful conviction is virtually impossible to calculate.

Estimates in the United States range between 0.5 and 5 percent of all incarcerated persons. With close to two million Americans in prison, this amounts to thousands of innocent people in detention.

Innocence Project

The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating people who it claims to have been falsely convicted “through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.”

False convictions are a global problem for many reasons like charging fake allegations by the actual criminal, lack of investigators’ skills, loopholes in the judicial system, law enforcement failures, errors made by both defense and prosecution, biased investigation imposition of power by influential people, etc.

This organization has saved lives of many from being in the darkness of a prison cell or from being executed, who were not meant to end up there at all.

Thus, over the years it has done a praiseworthy job in overturning wrong convictions bringing up attention to the failure of crime scene investigation and the flaws in all of forensic science as well.

However, geographically, it is highly constrained and it provides aid and counseling within very limited areas in US let alone providing global help.

Pros of the Innocence Project 

Case 1 – Lana Canen   

Lana Canen (43 years) was convicted for the murder of her neighbor Helen Sailor (94 years, November 2002) in the year 2005 and sentenced to 55 years in prison.

The Elkhart police being the investigating authority in the case invited Elkhart County Sheriff Department’s Detective Dennis Chapman to conduct a comparison of a latent fingerprint found on a plastic pill container in the victim’s apartment.

Detective Chapman without any proper training regarding latent fingerprints took on the case and performed a level one basic comparison on key similarities between both the suspected and sample prints and concluded it to be a match with Canen’s left small finger.

Attorney Cara Wieneke, believing in Canen’s innocence hired an independent expert to conduct an analysis of the prints. The expert propounded that according to his analysis Canen was excluded.

Thus, Wieneke filed for an evidentiary hearing and got Chapman to review and in turn retract his previous findings stating him being not qualified enough during the time of examination. This led to Lana Canen being finally exonerated.

This case throws light on the lack of proper and well-trained experts and their availability in each county thus leading to innocent people like Lana Canen going behind the bars.

Case 2 – Steven Barnes

In 1985 Steven Barnes, 19 was brought in as a suspect in the investigation of the rape and murder of a high school student Kimberley Simon.

Barnes was suspected of the murder primarily because of the similarity in the mud samples obtained from his muddy truck and the mud found near the victim’s body.

Barnes underwent a 12-hour interrogation and said that he was in a bar during the time of the murder and was released on that account. Two years later Barnes was asked for blood, saliva, and hair samples.

Barnes was finally arrested in 1988 and in his trial, forensic investigators claimed that soil, hair, and imprint from denim on his muddy truck matched samples from Simon.

It was enough to convince the jury along with vague eyewitness testimony. In June 1989, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Barnes wrote a letter to the team of Innocence Project who took up his case.

During the course of the Innocence Project’s work on the case, they got DNA tests twice but it came inconclusive due to lack of advanced DNA technologies and thus Barnes had to wait for 10 more years to finally get acquitted.

Josh D. Lee quoted ‘Other forensic tests lag behind DNA in several ways. These tests include fingerprinting, as well as the hair, soil, and denim imprint analysis used in Barnes’s trial. They cannot point to an individual, and little to no research has been conducted toward standardizing them or defining their error rates. Problems arise when attorneys, judges, or juries attach the same aura of reliability to all forensic sciences regardless of their scientific merit’.

The error of forensic experts to properly explain to the jury that hair, denim prints, and soil samples fall under Class evidence and aren’t absolute like DNA tests.

Cons of Innocence Project 

Case 3 – Alstory Simon

Jerry Hilard (18) and Marilyn Green (19) were killed in a park in Chicago’s south side in 1982 and Anthony Porter was charged with the offense and was sentenced to death but was freed and proven innocent by a Northwestern University professor and a team of his students who were working under the Innocence Project and aided the man’s acquittal.

This acquittal was historic in the sense that the then Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned Porter and stayed all the executions lined up.

Until Gov. Ryan was a staunch supporter of the death sentence but now, he paved the way for the state’s abolishment of the death sentence around a decade later.

This was considered to be a huge victory for the team of Innocence Project and the icing on the cake was that the team of university students led by Professor David Protess was even able to find the real culprit behind the murders; Alstory Simon.

However, a huge pandemonium was created when Anita Alvarez a public prosecutor took interest in the case after Simon’s repeated plea of innocence.

Although Simon had already confessed to the crime he recanted his statement after his sentencing and came forth with the fact that the confession was coerced by an armed private investigator Paul Ciolino.

Alstory Simon was exonerated thus leaving two prime suspects of the case Anthony Porter and Alstory Simon on the streets, one of whom is very well believed to be the actual perpetrator of the crime according to the experts.

Wrongful Conviction Reasons

Failure of crime scene investigators inappropriately acting their duty is considered as one of the biggest causes of wrongful convictions. This is mainly due to the following reasons:

• The inability of the crime scene investigators to secure the scene properly upon arrival
• Untrained professionals handling evidence
• The underdeveloped skill set of the forensic expert isn’t up to the mark to deal with the case in question
• Using older standards or testing procedures which are slowly becoming more and more obsolete
• Crime Scene Investigator when acting as expert witnesses tend to portray class evidence like fibers, soil samples, hairs, etc. as stronger and omnipotent evidence rather than explaining to the court of law its true evidentiary value.
• Lack of neutrality of Crime Scene Investigator leading to them siding with the Investigating Officers and trying to prove the suspect guilty rather than staying neutral.

The above flaws have led to many cases of fallacies and in turn conviction and sentencing of many innocent people.

The project helped Lana Canen and Steven Barnes as seen in above case study 1 and case study 2.

While in Canen’s case it was a lack of proper training and an underdeveloped skill set of the Crime Scene Investigator, Detective Dennis Chapman leading Lana Canen, an innocent person to be sentenced to a term of 55 years and living in prison for 8 whole years before finally getting justice for herself.

Steven Barnes had been sentenced to 25 years in prison and had to stay behind bars for over half of the term of the sentence before finally being acquitted.

This case informs the people working in the field of forensics to keep their personal views and feelings in check and work according to the procedure established till now, i.e., treating class evidence as that instead of raising its value falsely up to that of DNA evidence as seen here.

Also, this brought into light the necessity of judges and jurors to undergo a basic forensics training or workshop so as not to be forced to blindly believe in whatever the Investigator or the forensic expert happens to say.

Like every coin has its two faces, a justice system which was meant to protect the innocent and punish the criminals although rarely but ends up doing the vice-versa thus giving rise to Innocence Project, the Innocence project, in turn, is also not free of its pros and cons, it’s evident in Alstory Simon’s case as mentioned in Case study 3.

Simon’s is an exemplary case, very famous among the judicial network for its highly unexpected case developments and thus warns everyone related to the judicial system to look at all aspects of a crime before making judgment and also Innocence project which first helped Anthony Porter get out of prison should have checked the facts properly and presented their case accordingly as although there’s a possibility that Anthony Hopkins was innocent but there also remains the possibility of Alstory Simon being innocent as well thus the Innocent Project (David Protess, President of Chicago Innocent Project) helped an innocent man get out of prison by sacrificing another innocent man’s independence.

Although this seems like a single case of fault the fact remains that it is one case that was detected and there remains a chance that Innocent Project in their pursuit for aiding the humanitarian cause might lead someone out of the cage who actually doesn’t deserve to be out.

Way Forward

Innocence Project is ultimately an asset as although it might accidentally make a blunder like the Alstory Simon case, it’s also a fact that they have helped over three hundred people in getting their lives back so maybe this isn’t as bad as it might seem at a first glance. So, to deal with this issue, the following steps might be taken by various agencies as follows:

Crime Scene Investigators (CSIs)

CSIs should be trained properly and must be well versed in all the latest technologies

Before joining the front lines, CSIs should undergo a standardized examination for the job which should be uniform across the globe to ensure the quality of investigators, and also the competition would lead the good to become better and better to the best. 

CSIs should now the value of appropriate speech i.e. they should not exaggerate the value of a class evidence or some other fact just to prove their point in the court of law, rather they should state the facts as it is and explain the jurors their significance, for e.g. if a juror is told that if the base pairs which are like chemical units of DNA were off by 1% for humans, they might have looked more like apes, or gibbons thus explaining that this is a very small yet unique study which comprises of such unique sequences that each human can be differentiated with its help (except monozygotic twins).

CSIs should maintain neutrality in their way of working, i.e., they are neither working for the police force nor lawyers to forcibly prove someone guilty or not, and neither they should side with the suspect. Instead, they should simply state their findings and present them in court to the best of their knowledge and defend/her report whoever it might favor until and unless the report states the truth.

Judges and the Jurors

Judges and jurors should be taught about basic forensics, workings of simple apparatuses and principles to understand the bigger picture in the court of law. Since they regularly deal with such cases, they must understand the basics so as to understand minute details of both the case and the report easily.

Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys

Attorneys should understand the basic forensics to present the facts in a better manner and understand the repercussion of each evidence and how to utilize them in the court of law, as it is observed that on some rare occasions attorneys, either knowingly or unknowingly end up not presenting important evidence thinking of them as impertinent thus costing a lot to the defendant(s) or victim(s)

First Responders 

They must note the time and date of receiving the call and their time of arrival at the scene. First Responders have a basic responsibility of securing the crime scene. They also are supposed to check the vitals of the victim and provide medical assistance if alive or leave the body as it is creating a perimeter around the crime scene and take accounts from all the bystanders present.

References

Alstory Simon, freed from prison after wrongful conviction, spends his time in Greater Cleveland working to free others . n.d. 1 June 2021.

Anthony Porter . No. 3544. n.d.

Forensic Science and The Innocence Project. n.d. 1 June 2021.

Innocence Project . 1992. Innocene Project. June 2021. <https://innocenceproject.org/>.

Innocence project . "Marvin Anderson." case history. n.d.

innocenceproject.org. Wrongful Convictions Involving Unvalidated or Improper Forensic Science. February 2016. 1 June 2021.

Krieger, Steven A. Why Our Justice System Convicts Innocent People, and the Challenges Faced by Innocence Project Trying to Exonerate Them. n.d.

Lana Canen. No. 4047. n.d.

Weathered, Lynne. "Investigating Innocence." Griffith Law Review, 12:1, ( (2003): 64-90.

Written by: Mrinmoy Mukherjee, Fulmita Deb