On paper at least, the U.S. Constitution’s “due process of law” clause is the citizens’ guarantee against wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
But once inside a courtroom, all bets are off. Research shows that eyewitness misidentification, false confessions and government use of snitches as witnesses — all part of due process — too often put innocent people behind bars.
According to Innocence Project attorneys at the Cordozo School of Law in New York City, courts in 34 states have used DNA testing to reverse more than 230 criminal convictions and free wrongly convicted peeople who, on average, have spent 12 years in prison.
In Texas, 38 convictions have been nullified. The state’s first reversal took place in 1994 after Gilbert Alejandro had served more than three years for a 1990 sexual assault conviction.
At the trial, evidence against Alejandro included the victim’s eyewitness identification based on a police lineup and improper use of faulty forensic evidence. DNA testing of crime scene evidence finally proved he had been wrongfully convicted.
The latest reversal overturned the 1986 sexual assault conviction for which Timothy Cole had served 13 years in prison. Cole had been convicted based on the victim’s identifications and invalidated forensic tests. DNA testing of semen recovered at the crime scene showed he had not committed the crime.
These cases expose serious breakdowns in America’s justice systems. If the courtroom failures found in these cases are at work in all state and local justice systems, what good are Constitutional guarantees?
Each year, decisions are made in many thousands of cases in which DNA evidence is not available as a technical check on the reliability of traditional evidence.
In these cases, a person’s guilt or innocence may well be determined by error-prone eyewitness testimony, unreliable forensic procedures, government snitches and false, self-incriminating statements often obtained under heavy duress.
“These DNA exoneration cases,” says the Innocence Project, “have provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but arise from systemic defects that can be precisely identified and addressed.”
Eyewitness misidentification testimony has been a factor in 74 percent of post-conviction DNA-exoneration cases, making it the leading cause of such wrongful convictions. And two in five of these eyewitness identifications involved cross-racial identification. Studies have shown that people are less able to recognize faces of a different race than of their own.
Traditional eyewitness identification procedures are known to give unintended clues that result in misidentifications. The project recommends using double blind lineups, where neither the witness nor the lineup administrators know the suspect.
Unlike DNA testing, which is based on solid scientific research, according to the project, other forensic techniques, such as hair microscopy, bite-mark and shoe-print comparisons, have never been subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation.
As well as the need to validate all forensic techniques scientifically, the technicians need to be well trained to ensure that results are accurate.
False confessions lead to wrongful convictions in about 25 percent of cases, many involving defendants younger than 18 or developmentally disabled.
To prevent coercion and provide an accurate record, all police interrogations should be electronically recorded, says the project. In homicide cases, Illinois, Maine and New Mexico already require taping.
All communications between snitches and prosecutors should be recorded and judges should instruct juries that snitch testimony is unreliable.
Governments exist to protect individuals’ rights. When federal, state and local government prosecutors and judges knowingly tolerate judicial processes that violate the Constitutional rights of citizens they become rights violators themselves.
Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Project, a Washington-based civil-liberties organization.
