Seems there is a news item practically every other day about DNA tests freeing convicted prisoners including the link cited below re this issue. Is our legal system really this capricious that so many innocent (at least of the crime they are accused of) people are convicted?
For example - If a guy is arrested and told so and so says you raped her. If he cannot account with witnesses for the time the purported assault happened is it really just - he said/she said - in the end? Are these people in jail mainly pre-DNA testing, wouldn’t proper testing have removed them as suspects in the first place? Are rape victims pressed to identify falsely by police convinced that they have gotten their man or is the crime so dis-orienting to memory that
rape victims can honestly believe that an incorrectly identifed person raped them.
I’d be interested in hearing from any SD’ers with criminal justice experience as to their opinions re this.
To answer the first question, I don’t know that 72 cases is enough to call the system capricious.It would depend on the number convicted during the same time period.It’s enough to call the system imperfect,certainly, and an argument against the death penalty, but capricious is another story.
Using the rape example, it is possible ( although I’ve never personally seen it) that a person who did not actually commit the rape can be convicted of it using the same theory by which if two people commit a robbery, and one kills the victim, both can be convicted of murder. Also, a fair amount of rape cases are he said-she said only about the issue of consent. That is, he doesn’t deny having sex, only that it was against her will. DNA would be of no help in a cases like those.About the mis-identifications, I don’t think it’s either because of police pressure,or that rape is necessarily more disorienting than other violent crimes.Witness identifications of strangers, especially those of other races, are not as reliable as people sometimes think they are.
There are in essence three possible defenses against a rape charge:
It never happened.
It happened, but it was consensual.
The “SODDI” defense (Some Other Dude Did It; that is, it happened, it was non-consensual, but it wasn’t the defendent).
DNA has value in #1 and #3.
It is perfectly possible to convict without DNA evidence. It is also possible - although unlikely - that a jury will convict on a he-said-she-said basis. In general, juries want to see more.
Unfortunately, in my experience, juries also tend to judge both the accused and the victim. There are certain kinds of victims that automatically win points with the jury, and certain kinds that automatically lose points. As an extreme case, it would be very difficult if the prosecutrix were a prostitute, even if the rape occurred outside the bounderies of her professional life, because the jury will simply not like her, and tend to believe that it can’t be rape if she sells her body for a living. At the other extreme, a minister’s wife or a policemen’s wife will win great points with the jury.
There are evidentiary points as to consent that can be exploited by the prosecution. It’s hard to argue consent if the victim is terribly beaten. Juries want to see some evidence of resistance, even though they’re told they don’t need to.
Juries want the victim emotional, but not too emotional. They will aquit a defendent who is well-dressed, well-mannered, and seems to have a promising life in front of him.
All this said… I would vetnure to say that it’s extremely rare for an actually innocent man to be convicted and lose any appeals. But it certainly happens.
I recently read the statistic that routine DNA testing has proven the innocence of 26% of the “principal suspects” in rape cases. It’s virtually impossible to argue that, if the DNA testing hadn’t been performed, some of these suspects would not have been subsequently convicted.
What’s really shocking is how reluctant the court system is to allow the use of new DNA tests to appeal old convictions. Only two states are currently allowing open appeals based on the fact that this new technology exists. Most jurisdictions are making every attempt to forestall these appeals. In a few cases, judges have even ruled that convictions must stand even though DNA evidence has proven the innocence of those convicted. In other places, hundreds of pieces of evidence are being destroyed daily despite the fact that appeals are being made based on the testing of this same evidence.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that convicted felons should be granted endless appeal opportunities based on legal trivialities. But I think it should be mandatory that if a new technology for judging evidence is discovered, it should be used at least as fervently to help the defense of the wrongfully convicted as it is to help the conviction of the truly guilty.
I’ll admit straight out that I don’t have the cites for particular cases and haven’t read the decisions. But the general theory is that when you’re on trial, you are considered to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. However once you are convicted, you will be considered guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. So evidence which might be sufficient to acquit you at your trial may not be sufficient to overturn your conviction on appeal. In my humble (and non-judicial) opinion, DNA evidence should be considered conclusive enough to meet this standard. However, some judges do not agree.
Do any legal historians have any stories to tell about similar issues which undoubtedly arose when fingerprint evidence was first entering the legal system?
Well, I don’t know about how disorienting the crime is (one would have to assume it’s about as disorienting as a situation can be), but people’s eyewitness testimony is often just not worth a damn when it comes to identifying one person vs. another. The witness who testifies with great confidence that Defendant A committed the crime can heavily influence a jury, but identification of perpetrators is relatively unreliable.
One study (by Simons & Levin, I think) had the experimenter stop a participant outside a college and open a map, asking for directions. 60 seconds or so later, the interaction was interrupted by a pair of gentlemen carrying a door in between the participant and experimenter. When the door passed, the experimenter left with the last half of the door, and the person carrying the back of the door picked up the conversation where the original experimenter left off (sorry the description isn’t better - it sounds rather crude, but the tradeoff was carried out flawlessly). The new experimenter didn’t resemble the first one - different shade of hair, different clothing, but in over 50% of cases, even when asked afterwards if ‘anything seemed unusual’ about the interaction, about 50% of the subjects were unaware of the change. (Further information and a more eloquent description can be found in Galotti, 1999)
I saw this experiment’s ‘hidden camera’ footage in class, and it was hilarious. There are dozens of experiments that are designed to find this ‘change-blindness’, but this one was very dramatic.
Yes, eyewinesses, in general, don’t really remember much about a criminal. However, keep in mind that in many or most rapes, the victim knows her attacker before the event. If a woman recognizes the perpetrator as her boyfriend Joe, then there’s not really much doubt, is there? Of course, it’s still her word against his, but one would think that there’s at least no honest mistakes.
This is quite accurate, as far as it goes. A finding of guilty destroys the presumption of innocence. But this does not close the door to reversing the verdict with new evidence; it simply means that the burden of proof is reversed. In general, the defense must show that (1) the new evidence was not available to them at the time of trial, through due diligence, and (2) the introduction of the evidence would have likely changed the outcome of the trial.
I thus take issue with Little Nemo’s previous statement that:
The implication of that statement is disturbing. But it’s also misleading. If the defense can satisfy the first prong of that test (the evidence was not available to them) then the second is a given, since “…DNA evidence has proven the innocence…” of the accused. A motion for a new trial would succeed. I would therefore challenge someone to come up with cites, or withdraw or modify this claim.
The only cases in which such a motion might fail is if the defense had access to the DNA evidence at the first trial, but chose, for whatever reason, not to introduce it. In that event, it doesn’t qualify as ‘new evidence’ – the defense has waived its right to use it.
Now, it’s certainly possible that the defense simply royally screwed up – that they had the DNA evidence, didn’t use it, and for no good tactical reason at all. The evidence is still waived, but the accused has an appeal not for newly discovered evidence, but for ineffective assistance of counsel.
I don’t, but I’m not exactly a legal historian. My gut feel is it’s unlikely, though, as fingerprint are evanescent evidence, and unlikely to be preserved when no one knew they existed. In other words, if a guy was jailed for bank robbery before fingerprint technology existed, there would be no way to go back and check the fingerprints at the bank once people knew how to do that.
On the other hand, it has for years been possible to test semen for blood type and secretor type, so rape kits had evidentiary value before DNA existed. It is, then, much more common to find rape kits that were thought to have inculpatory value, and test them later for DNA.