Even after more evidence comes to light, some prosecutors refuse to back down.
By Chris Conway Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
Since the Innocence Project was founded by two New York City lawyers in 1992, some 200 of its clients — people convicted of murder and other crimes and sent to prison, often spending decades behind bars — have been exonerated with the help of DNA or other science-based evidence. Several dozen additional exonerations involved evidence other than DNA. |
Although the Innocence Project has pioneered this work, others have also labored to free people they believe were wrongly convicted, as Lisa Belkin, a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of the forthcoming book "Genealogy of a Murder," writes in a guest essay this week. |
They include the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in the case of Randall Dale Adams, who is the subject of Morris's "The Thin Blue Line" and had been sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of a police officer, and a Florida judge who left the bench to represent Leo Schofield, who has been imprisoned in Florida for the past 34 years for the murder of his wife and is the subject of the podcast "Bone Valley," hosted by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King. |
In both cases, as Ms. Belkin writes, prosecutors continued to hold fast to their belief that the men were guilty, even though others later admitted to the crimes. Though many prosecutors in recent years have shown more willingness to reopen cases in the face of new evidence, others have remained intransigent. |
Prosecutions can go awry for many reasons, as the Innocence Project's founders, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, explained in their book "Actual Innocence," written with Jim Dwyer, a great reporter and columnist for The New York Times who died in 2020. |
"Sometimes eyewitnesses make mistakes," they wrote. "Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated. Racism trumps the truth. Lab tests are rigged. Defense lawyers sleep. Prosecutors lie." |
What puzzled Ms. Belkin after years of covering the justice system as a reporter and author was how, even in the face of seemingly undeniable evidence, some prosecutors vociferously opposed efforts to free people they had convicted. She covered the Adams case in 1989 and listened recently to "Bone Valley." |
"The Schofield case was so like the Adams case that it was the obvious place to ask questions," she told me. "How do these — what to call them? Obstructionists? Die-hards? True believers? — in prosecutors' offices become so resistant? There are arguably fewer of them because of changes since Randall Adams, but they are still there." |
The result was her essay. |
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