The Innocence Project

In the my post regarding the lasting implications of Mike Nifong’s misconduct in the Duke Lacrosse case, Ed Brown aka Darkstar chimes in and asks:

Is the same outrage displayed against Nifong, displayed when The Innocence Project highlights another case where they have helped get an innocent person out of jail?

No?

Why. Not?

Unsatisfied with my answer that

The Innocence Project became more successful at freeing the innocent mostly because of the advent of DNA technology--something which Nifong already had access to when he decided to prosecute the players...

Darkstar counters with the Innocence Project’s objective conclusion that

Most law enforcement officers and prosecutors are honest and trustworthy. But criminal justice is a human endeavor and the possibility for corruption exists. Even if one officer of every thousand is dishonest, wrongful convictions will continue to occur.

DNA exonerations have exposed official misconduct at every level and stage of a criminal investigation. This misconduct has included:

• deliberate suggestiveness in identification procedures
• the withholding of evidence from defense
• the deliberate mishandling, mistreatment or destruction of evidence
• the coercion of false confessions
• the use of unreliable government informants or snitches

and, again, wonders where the similar outrage is.

There are three main reasons that the Duke case has incited more outrage that those featured in the Innocence Project. I thought that the reasons were obvious, but apparently they aren’t.

• 24/7 cable news.
• Like their broadcast predecessors, cable news networks make choices as to what stories they’re going to cover; some choices--and trends--are better than others.
• Most observers aren't Internet junkies like we are.

Simply put, large-scale outrage about a given injustice cannot be elicited from the American public if the latter don't know about it.

I suspect that Darkstar would also note that the accused in the Duke case were from relatively well-to-do families who could afford quality legal representation—unlike many of those from the Innocence Project—and that this fact played a part in their subsequent exoneration (the Innocence Blog concurs). Quality legal representation is often a buttress against to types of mistakes and misconduct listed above. Most of the 203 men exonerated under the Innocence Project were poor, black and Hispanic (but not all) and were originally represented by public defenders of varying quality. In fact, some of the primary purposes of the organization are to close financial/quality gap for those who may have been wrongly accused and convicted; to

help pay for DNA tests, provide staffing for case intake and litigation, support our reform initiatives nationwide, and help educate the public…

and to encourage others to close the information gap:

Share your perspective and thoughts about why wrongful convictions must be discussed and addressed. Write letters to the editor in response to articles or editorials so that the media – and policymakers who are in a position to help prevent wrongful convictions — know that the public is concerned about these issues.

However, I still think that had the Duke incident occurred fifteen to twenty years ago, it’s far less certain that the lacrosse players would have been found innocent due to the combination of factors, with the scope and scale of information exchange playing the key role. Again, one cannot have outrage for an injustice that one doesn’t know about.

I urge readers to look through Innocence Project’s database of success stories and note that, in almost all cases, the loss of freedom was just the beginning. Here’s Herman Atkins’ story.

You Tube has many more videos of such men.