The creation of the unit marks a "shift in philosophy," in which the office intends to "increase our focus and our openness about these cases," Alvarez said at a City Club of Chicago luncheon.

"In my view, my job is not just about racking up convictions, it's about always seeking justice, even if that measure of justice means that we must acknowledge mistakes of the past," she said

The Conviction Integrity Unit, which has been operating for the last month, consists of three prosecutors, two investigators and one victim-witness specialist, Alvarez said.

Read the full article.

Read background on the Chicago-area cases.

"Less than 10 percent of serious felony cases have any biological evidence in them, which can identify the real perpetrator with a DNA test," Mr. Scheck said. "And most of the serious offenders are already in the DNA database. This isn't the No. 1 priority."

Regala knows what it's like to want justice for a violent crime. The Tacoma Democrat said her brother-in-law was killed in 1980 and his body dumped in a Seattle park. The killer was never found, she said.

"It's still painful and hard for me to talk about because the hurt never goes away," Regala said, "but executing that person doesn't solve that problem for me."

Washington State has executed only five people since the present death penalty law was passed in 1981.

Seventeen people have been proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in the United States after serving time on death row. They were convicted in 11 states and served a combined 209 years in prison - including 187 years on death row - for crimes they didn't commit.

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Read the Seattle Times article.

Read about The Innocence Project's Position on the Death Penalty.

The Innocent and the Death Penalty.

DOJ involvement doesn't have to be an either-or decision, said Peter Neufeld, a founder and director of the Innocence Project [8], a national organization that works to exonerate innocent prisoners and reform the criminal justice system. Neufeld said a national agency of forensic science should be a collective undertaking.

A scientific entity could set national standards and the DOJ could be charged with accreditation and certification.

Read the full article.

Read background on the NAS report.

The Baker's Dozen has a bank account, and Liz Olson, a senior at Mount Tabor, is the group's treasurer. It's a shoestring operation. The group allocates no more than $500 for production costs that include hall rental and rights for a play. A portion of the proceeds helps defray such expenses. The rest goes to a cause that is a related to a show.

Organizations that have received donations range from Open Arms Community Inc. of Winston-Salem to the Educators' Institute for Human Rights in Rwanda. The latter, which received $2,200, complemented the Holocaust theme of "Anne Frank & Me," which was staged in October.

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That's because the report found no O-type secretions, and because the woman is a "non-secretor." That means there was no mix of her type with the A-type found during an exam that might have masked Diggins' blood type, Innocence Project Co-founder Barry Scheck said.

. . .

Even if Diggins' trial attorney, Martin Regan, had the blood report during the trial -- he says he didn't -- it would show that Diggins' rights were violated by ineffective counsel, Scheck argued.

"Either way, Booker Diggins is not the man who committed this aggravated rape, and that's clear," Scheck said. The DA's office "has done nothing but raise procedural issues here ... It bothers me a lot. I haven't heard the prosecutors' answer to the scientific ones."

Criminal District Judge Frank Marullo set a hearing date in March to learn more about the blood evidence.

Read the full article.

Read more background on the case.

First, more than 2,000 studies into the mechanics and psychology of eyewitness identifications, all published since the court's 1977 decision, have found a wide range of variables that produce inaccurate eyewitness identifications. They include the presence of a weapon, consumption of alcohol or drugs, how long a witness watched what was happening, how long after a crime an identification is made and the race and age of an alleged perpetrator. They go well beyond suggestive conditions set up by police.

Second, despite the often-shaky reliability of eyewitness identifications and the opportunity of defense lawyers to expose flaws through cross-examination in court, juries place disproportionate faith in the IDs anyway.

The Commercial Appeal printed Jessie's confession. Not the complete confession-with all the errors in it, with the police pushing him to change the details four or five times until they fit the facts-only the final version, after it was all cleaned up. As if what they printed just spilled out of his mouth.

Rebecca Brown, with the Innocence Project, said a favorable aspect of Virginia's compensation law is that an exonerated person can get a transition assistance grant of $15,000 (to be deducted from any compensation award) to help adjust from prison.

Nevertheless, she said there are aspects of Virginia's law that could be improved. "We would say that it falls short of our recommended amount of at least $50,000 per year - that should be the baseline," she said.
And capping awards at 20 years is unfair to anyone who served more than 20 years, said Brown, the senior policy advocate for state affairs. "One should be compensated for each year served."

Also, just giving 20 percent initially can be a problem. "That can prove burdensome for the exoneree who may not have adequate funding to get back on his feet," she said.

Today's decision comes after months of resistance from the State's Attorney's Office. DNA testing results implicating the real perpetrator, a convicted murderer, were released nearly a year ago. In spite of this overwhelming evidence of innocence, the prosecution stood by the convictions. Saunders and Richardson were released in November 2011 when a Chicago judge threw out the convictions. Swift and Thames were already released and living under strict regulation as registered sex offenders.

Read more about the case here.

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Most notably, in 1999 Louisiana came within 48 hours of executing John Thompson, convicted in a 1985 murder in New Orleans, before a private investigator hired by his defense attorneys chanced upon blood evidence buried in crime lab archives that ultimately led to a retrial and a full acquittal. A prosecutor later confessed that he and others had "intentionally suppressed" the blood evidence, according to federal court documents.

After a series of DNA exonerations in 2002, 2003 and 2004, the Innocence Project urged then-Governor Mark Warner to order an audit of all convictions covering the 15-year span where there was evidence suitable for DNA testing. The six-year study was largely aided by a massive discovery of untested biological evidence found in the notebooks of lab technicians, including Mary Jane Burton. Evidence from Burton's notebooks have aided in at least six DNA exonerations in Virginia.

The Virginia Department of Forensic Science recently reported the findings, and the Urban Institute is analyzing them. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

John Roman, a senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said institute researchers reviewing 638 Virginia cases have identified 37 "that might support exoneration and that certainly support further investigation."

Samuel Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an expert on wrongful convictions was surprised by the error rate uncovered in the study.

"I would have guessed an error rate of 1 or 2 percent. Six percent is surprisingly high," Gross said.

"Beyond that there's this truly troubling fact that somebody now has (exculpatory) information about three dozen people who were convicted ... and we have heard nothing about these cases," Gross said.