According to the Innocence Project Organization, there have been 272 people in the United States who have been exonerated from post conviction DNA testing. These people spent an average of 13 years in prison and 17 of them had been sentenced to death prior to exoneration. Prior to DNA testing, states employed a procedure called “blood-typing,” to try and match suspects with forensic evidence found at the scene of the crime. This procedure did not allow forensic laboratories to make fine distinctions between suspects, instead it was only able to confirm or deny whether the suspect had the same blood type as the one found at the crime scene. It was not until 1983 that Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize winning chemist, discovered the importance of DNA replication and subsequently founded the DNA testing procedure. Although the misidentification of DNA evidence has led to many exonerations in recent years, there are many other non-DNA reasons people have been wrongfully convicted.There are six main causes of wrongful convictions in the United States: eyewitness misidentification, improper or unfounded forensic science, false confessions, government misconduct, informants/snitches, and bad lawyering. Eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions nationwide. The reason for such a high number of misidentifications is the fact that witnesses really want to make someone pay, and the resulting fact that identification serves as very powerful evidence to a jury. Prior to DNA testing, crime labs utilized many forensic techniques to provide conclusive evidence, but most techniques were never properly validated. One of the most widely relied on invalidated forensic sciences was that of microscopic hair analysis. The only thing forensic hair analysis could be used for was to identify whether it came from a Caucasian, African American, or Chinese person. However, hair analysis was so weak that often hairs pulled from the same head would not match one another.
While the idea of someone falsely confessing to a crime seems to stump even the most highly intelligent person, statistics show that it occurred in about 25% of the exoneration cases. The people who are most vulnerable to making false confessions are juvenile defendants or people with mental disabilities. There are several other factors that contribute to false confessions, such as: duress, ignorance of the law, coercion, or interrogation techniques that provide a strong incentive for innocent people to confess due to the threat of a harsher sentence. Another cause of wrongful convictions is governmental misconduct, such as fraud or misconduct by police departments or prosecutors’ offices. The most common form of police misconduct that has occurred is the utilization of suggestive identification procedures, or the use of force to coerce a false confession. The most common form of prosecutorial misconduct is the withholding of exculpatory evidence from a defendant’s attorney. Along similar lines of government misconduct is the utilization of informants and snitches. The testimony of a jailhouse snitches resulted in about 15% of wrongful convictions across the country. Snitches and informants will falsely testify against an innocent person in exchange for monetary compensation or a lighter sentence. The final cause of wrongful convictions occurs as a result of bad lawyering on behalf of the defendant. Often times, defendants are given court-appointed public defenders that are overworked and underpaid. This results in the failure to properly prepare for trial or thoroughly investigate the defendant’s case.
