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Innocence Project officials testify on critical reforms today and tomorrow in South Carolina, Colorado and Connecticut
Posted: March 19, 2008 4:19 pm
It has been nearly 20 years since the first DNA exoneration, and seven states still have no law allowing prisoners to seek post-conviction DNA testing that can prove their innocence. But the tide is turning in at least two of those states. Last week, Wyoming’s governor signed a bill granting DNA testing access to some prisoners, and the law will go into effect this summer.
And today in the South Carolina legislature, Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck testified in support of a bill that would allow prisoners to apply for DNA testing if it could potentially prove their innocence.
“This kind of legislation has demonstrated again and again that it doesn’t just protect the innocent, it helps law enforcement identify the person who really committed the crime — often somebody who is a serial rapist or a serial murderer,” said Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, which is based in New York. “South Carolina knows this law is long overdue.”Innocence Project Policy Analyst Rebecca Brown will testify today in the Colorado legislature on a bill including preservation of biological evidence from crime scenes, and Policy Director Stephen Saloom will testify tomorrow on an eyewitness identification reform package before the Connecticut legislature.
Read the full story here. (Associated Press, 03/18/2008)
Read more about status of criminal justice improvement in your state here.
Tags: South Carolina, Access to DNA Testing
Roundup: Lawmakers in South Carolina and Colorado consider DNA reforms
Posted: March 20, 2008 2:28 pm
Lawmakers in Colorado and South Carolina yesterday heard testimony from the Innocence Project on bills to address and prevent wrongful convictions. In Colorado, Innocence Project Policy Analyst Rebecca Brown told legislators that the state’s proposed evidence preservation bill doesn’t go far enough to protect the innocent.
And Tim Masters, who was recently freed after serving 10 years for murder when evidence of his innocence surfaced, said that these laws affect people like him who are still behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit.
"If this bill is to serve as a standard for evidence-preservation practices, it will devastate innocence claims," testified Rebecca Brown, policy analyst for the Innocence Project, which has helped free 214 wrongfully convicted prisoners. "We're incredibly concerned that there will be no protections for the innocent."
…Tim Masters, recently freed by DNA testing, described how Larimer County prosecutors in his case opposed preservation of the evidence early in his appeal proceedings.In South Carolina, Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck told lawmakers yesterday that access to DNA testing is a vital right for prisoners. The bill, which would make South Carolina the 44th state to offer DNA access to prisoners, received preliminary approval and will head to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Read more here.
"I'd still be locked up" if the evidence had been tossed, Masters said, holding a copy of the district attorney's court motion citing current state law providing no duty to preserve the DNA.
Read the full story here. (Denver Post, 03/20/08)
Today in Connecticut, Innocence Project Policy Director Stephen Saloom will testify on a bill to reform eyewitness identification procedures.
Tags: South Carolina, Colorado, Evidence Preservation, Access to DNA Testing
South Carolina's most influential paper supports post-conviction DNA testing bill
Posted: May 13, 2008 5:00 pm
In its lead editorial today, South Carolina’s largest and most influential paper, The State, urged the legislature to pass a bill that would provide access to post-conviction DNA testing for people convicted of violent crimes.
Under current law, there’s no mechanism for such testing; in most cases, judges can’t order DNA testing — or do anything about it if such testing is somehow done and demonstrates the convict’s innocence — unless the solicitor agrees to the request.
That wouldn’t be a problem in an ideal world, because the job of prosecutors is to do justice, and so they would be just as anxious as anyone to make sure the wrong person isn’t in prison. The reality is different. Prosecutors are human and dislike admitting their mistakes; and besides, they grow cynical from hearing the inevitable claims of innocence from criminals who really aren’t innocent, so with rare exceptions, they fight tooth and nail against those claims.The Senate bill (S.429) passed last month and is headed to the House. It would make South Carolina the 44th state with a law on the books explicitly granting post-conviction DNA testing . In March, Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck told lawmakers that access to DNA testing is a vital right for prisoners.
And The State agrees that denying that right can harm all of us.
When the wrong person is convicted of a crime, the only clear winner is the actual criminal — although police and prosecutors might appear to be winners, since they were able to score a conviction. The person wrongly convicted certainly doesn’t win, and in fact we do incomprehensibly grave harm to that person. Neither do the rest of us, who are less safe because the real criminal remains free to harm others.
Read the editorial. (The State, 5/13/08)
Tags: South Carolina, Access to DNA Testing
South Carolina lawmakers approve DNA testing access
Posted: June 5, 2008 3:42 pm
A bill clearing the way for wrongfully convicted prisoners to seek DNA testing in South Carolina gained key approval Wednesday from the South Carolina House. The bill, which has already passed the State Senate and needs another vote in the House, would make South Carolina the 44th state to provide this access to prisoners. Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck testified in March in South Carolina to support the bill.
Read an editorial supporting the bill here. (The State, Updated 06/25/08)
The six other states without DNA access laws are Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts, Mississippi, South Dakota and Oklahoma.
Your voice will be crucial in our efforts to ensure DNA testing access for prisoners in these states. Sign our petition for DNA access today and help us call for this critical reform where it is needed most.
Tags: South Carolina, Access to DNA Testing
SC Column: Why we should preserve evidence
Posted: June 16, 2008 2:22 pm
A column in Friday’s Myrtle Beach Sun News asks why South Carolina doesn’t have a law on the books requiring evidence preservation in criminal cases. The hard science of DNA testing has freed 218 innocent people and solved countless cold cases. In the wake of the DNA revolution, dozens of states have moved to enact evidence preservation laws. But many, including South Carolina, have not created statewide standards for evidence preservation, and old evidence – often the only lifeline to an exoneration or to solving a case – is lost or destroyed. South Carolina lawmakers are considering a bill to require evidence preservation during this session.
Consider these numbers: the 218 DNA exonerations nationwide have been clustered in 32 states, meaning 18 states have not seen an exoneration. Of those 18, ten lack an evidence preservation law. This may not be a coincidence.
The Innocence Project has closed countless cases in which DNA testing cannot be conducted because evidence has been lost or destroyed. Improved evidence preservation is vital to building a more fair and efficient system of criminal justice in the U.S. Isaac Bailey’s column in Friday’s agrees:
Such a law has been considered this legislative session but is lost somewhere in the abyss of a House committee in Columbia. It's part of a bill that would allow DNA samples to be taken from those arrested for certain crimes and tested to prove innocence or guilt.
A lack of such a law in South Carolina is wrong on multiple levels…. Why should we be proud of a justice system which relies on a process that isn't all that just?
Read the full column here.
View our interactive maps of exonerations and reform policies.
Tags: South Carolina, Evidence Preservation
SC editorial: Grant prisoners access to DNA testing
Posted: June 25, 2008 4:02 pm
At a hearing today in South Carolina, lawmakers are considering making their state the 45th in the country to allow prisoners access to DNA testing that can prove innocence. An editorial in The State today says it is time for legislators to take action on this important bill.
When an innocent person goes to prison, a guilty person roams our streets, free to victimize again.
That is the practical reason we need to do all we reasonably can to make sure that the innocent aren’t convicted and that, if they are, those convictions are reversed and an investigation re-opened. The moral reason, of course, is that it’s wrong to imprison the innocent.
We will never get those initial convictions correct 100 percent of the time, but there is a way we can improve our chance of identifying and correcting the errors. Our Legislature will have the opportunity to put it into place today.
A bill awaiting final approval by the House and Senate would add our state to the 44 others that allow people convicted of murder, rape and a handful of other violent crimes to have DNA testing done if they can convince a judge it would likely prove them innocent. That’s something that, in most cases, cannot happen today.
Read the full editorial here. (The State, 06/25/08)
Tags: South Carolina, Access to DNA Testing
S.C. Governor vetoed DNA testing bill because of "bitter-pill amendment"
Posted: July 18, 2008 2:00 pm
The Columbia Free Times reports that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was forced to veto a bill supporting access to DNA testing when some legislators tacked on a provision that he had opposed in a separate bill. Gov. Sanford supported the bill’s original language which would have established laws for evidence preservation and would allow prisoners to seek DNA testing to prove their innocence, a path to exoneration that the state does not currently provide.
“We applaud the first part of the bill because it provides those who may have been wrongly accused a chance to clear their names and we fully support the notion of due process in all cases,” Sanford wrote in a July 2 veto letter to Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who presides over the state Senate. “If this were the only provision of [the bill], we would have signed this legislation into law.”
But a tacked-on provision would allow police to take DNA swabs from anyone arrested of a serious crime, even before they were convicted, which has raised concerns about civil liberties. Palmetto Innocence Project president Joe McCulloch told the Free Times that the amendment is what sank the legislation.
That legislation seemed to be on the fast track to passing but was torpedoed at the 11th hour by political maneuvering, McCulloch says.
At the end of the legislative session, lawmakers lifted language from a different and controversial DNA bill, which the governor had vetoed, and added it to the original legislation.
The tacked-on language, added on the last day of the legislative session, exploded any chance of the bill he supported passing, McCulloch says.
Read the Columbia Free Times article.
Tags: South Carolina, Evidence Preservation, Access to DNA Testing
New South Carolina law requires evidence preservation and access to DNA testing
Posted: October 23, 2008 4:51 pm
South Carolina this week became the 44th state in the U.S. with a law allowing convicted defendants to seek DNA testing when it has the potential to prove innocence. The State House voted 86-25 Tuesday to override a veto by Gov. Mark Sanford, and the Senate voted 36-0 to override the veto on Monday.
The bill also ensures that crime scene evidence will be preserved in most serious felony convictions until the defendant is released from custody (unless they pled guilty, in which case the evidence would only be preserved for seven years).
Sanford said he vetoed the bill because he didn’t support a provision that allows law enforcement agencies to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony. This is a provision that the Innocence Project also does not support, as we believe that collecting DNA from people who were not convicted of felonies violates personal privacy and impedes law enforcement.
Read more here. (The Greenville News, 10/22/08)
What are the DNA access and evidence preservation laws in your state? Find out on our interactive map.
Tags: South Carolina, Evidence Preservation, Access to DNA Testing
Editorial Urges States to Follow NJ in Eyewitness Identification Reform
Posted: July 30, 2012 1:50 pm
South Carolina exoneree Perry Mitchell spent nearly 15 years behind bars for a rape he didn’t commit, largely due to an eyewitness misidentification, before DNA testing proved his innocence and set him free in 1998. Now, an editorial in the Sun News questions if things would have gone differently if the trial court had been required to give jury instructions about eyewitness identification testimony like those recently issued by the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Beginning in September, jurors in any New Jersey case that includes eyewitness testimony will be informed about the many factors that can undercut the ability of an eyewitness to make an accurate identification.
Warning jurors to take some extra time with the evidence rather than trusting it implicitly is a worthy goal. Currently, while S.C. judges can and do offer some instructions to juries on state laws that affect cases, jurors will hear no similar instruction in Palmetto courtrooms. Jurors are on their own and whatever information they already happen to have about the reliability of evidence.
…
New Jersey has shown us the way. We may no longer be able to be first in this reform, but we sure shouldn’t be last. Let’s get ahead of the curve and help build momentum for the change across the nation. Justice demands it.
Read the full editorial.
Read more about Mitchell’s case.
Tags: South Carolina, Eyewitness Identification