Innocence Blog
March 26, 2007
Innocence Network conference draws hundreds
More than 300 people from dozens of organizations and perspectives in the innocence movement around the world met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over the last three days to discuss the past year’s work as well as challenges and goals ahead. The group included more than 50 people exonerated after being wrongly convicted of crimes they didn’t commit – the largest group of exonerees ever to attend such a conference.
- Click here for more on the Innocence Network.
- Email us for further contact information on presenters and conference materials.
- Watch the Innocence Blog for photos and more from the conference in the days to come.
States are slow to fix crime lab problems
Oversight of forensic crime labs has developed slowly around the United States, despite a 2004 federal law that requires states to conduct inquiries into allegations of fraud, mistakes or misconduct.
Tackling critical problems in the nation's justice system, Minnesota, Texas and Virginia have each founded powerful oversight boards in the last two years that can investigate misconduct in crime labs.
But not one of the new boards has yet reopened a case — either because they have refused to do so or because they haven't been funded.
"The country has to have trust that we're convicting the guilty and not the innocent," said Texas state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat whose bill to create the Texas Forensic Science Commission became law in 2005.
Read the full story. (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/24/07)
The flaws in his state and elsewhere are "the tip of the iceberg," Hinojosa said. "Prosecutors are supposed to do justice. Instead, they just want notches on their belt. It permeates the whole criminal justice system."
Read more on crime lab oversight in our Fix The System section.
New Virgina project starts working to free wrongly convicted
Joining more than 35 projects working nationwide on behalf of the wrongly convicted, the new Institute for Actual Innocence at the Richmond College of Law is a legal clinic where law students assist convicted individuals with appeals asserting innocence.
Professor Mary Kelly Tate said she was inspired to create the institute after hearing a speech by Peter Neufeld. He is a defense lawyer who helped found the Innocence Project, a program that focuses on using DNA testing to exonerate wrongfully convicted people.
Tate teaches a prerequisite course on the causes of wrongful conviction. Race, social and economic factors all contribute, as well as poor interrogation techniques by police, false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications.
Most of the time, she said, the criminal justice system works as it should and guilty people go to prison. But it's important to help students recognize the possibility for error in the system before they begin practicing law, she said.
"We make mistakes," she said. "There's something sort of primitive in society's unwillingness to face that."
Read the full story. (Daily Press, 3/26/07)
Visit the Richmond Institute for Actual Innocence website.
March 26-30 is Innocence Week in Washington, D.C.
The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and Washington College of Law are sponsoring Innocence Week, which starts today.
The weeklong symposium examining wrongful convictions in America will feature four free luncheon lectures and a production of the award-winning play “The Exonerated” on Thursday and Friday nights. Click here for more information.
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