Sometimes, it seems like the police don’t follow evidence at all. They seem almost determined to identify a suspect. “Who looks good for this crime?” they might ask. They sometimes get tunnel vision, looking for evidence the suspect is guilty and dismissing evidence...
Wrongful Convictions
Robert Roberson is on death row for what might have been an accident
“It’s no exaggeration to say hundreds if not thousands of parents and caregivers are in prison in cases where no crime occurred,” says a spokesperson for the Innocence Project. Robert Roberson may be one of them. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 after...
Is it better for the guilty to go free than to risk a wrongful incarceration?
One of the most well-known and frequently quoted legal maxims is this: it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” That was written by Sir William Blackstone in 1765, but it is far from the first or only expression of the idea....
Federal judge holds a federal sex offender rule unconstitutional
A federal judge in California has found a key part of the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) to be unconstitutional. SORNA makes it a federal crime when a sex offender fails to register and then travels outside their state. People convicted...
10 principles for reducing mass incarceration
In the United States, we incarcerate more of our population than any other country in the world. In fact, while the U.S. makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, it is responsible for locking up almost 25% of all the prisoners in the world. Even if the system...
A Texas death row inmate was convicted on a ‘false’ DNA test
Can DNA evidence be wrong? You bet. Although it is a sophisticated science, it is still performed by human beings. Sometimes, people make mistakes – and some people make more mistakes than others. At issue is a Texas crime lab that “so consistently and egregiously...
Richard Glossip didn’t do it and we know who did. Why is he on death row?
In January 1997, Justin Sneed murdered an Oklahoma motel owner named Barry Van Treese. He has admitted as much. In exchange for more favorable treatment, Sneed agreed to implicate and testify against Richard Glossip, the motel’s manager. The prosecution’s theory was...
Now exonerated of murder, man had same name as suspect
Thomas Raynard James has now spent more than half of his life in prison. Over 31 years were stolen from him by a wrongful conviction based on a series of mistakes that led to a mistaken identification. Never once did he give up trying to prove his innocence, and now...
Why is discredited forensic science still being used as evidence?
In 2009, a committee of the prestigious National Research Council (NRC) published a report for Congress that shocked the entire criminal justice system. Congress had asked the NRC to evaluate the scientific underpinnings of commonly used forensic evidence and suggest...
Wrongfully convicted man sues Milwaukee for rights violations
Two months after Lavare Gould, 19, was killed in 2008, Milwaukee police had no suspect or leads. Then, a man who was arrested in an unrelated case claimed to have information about Gould’s case. The information was conflicting, but it implicated Ladarious Marshall,...