It’s not just DNA, however. It’s changes in eyewitness identification procedures, recording of statements and confessions, all of the “hard” evidence that has put hundreds of thousands of defendants in prison for many years. But it comes from the 207 innocent defendants who were exonerated because of DNA. Without DNA, they would be guilty, guilty, guilty, and the system would go on with business as usual.
So are the police happy to know that they are no longer arresting innocent people? Not exactly.
“Simply put, these two bills create loopholes for defendants to get an edge in court on technicalities,” according to a letter from the sheriffs’ organization to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. The association also opposed a state bill that would create guidelines for suspect lineups.
There’s the tension. To some, innocence is a technicality. And all the changes add burdens to the job. When laws require cops to do things in specific ways, whether sequential line-ups, or recording confessions, they’re viewed as traps for the unwary cop to blow a solid bust. In other words, it’s all about the cop, not the innocent person.
“I’m not fond of legislation,” said Lieutenant Patenaude, the Massachusetts police commander. “I’ve been asked to review bills in several states, and I haven’t seen one that mirrors the best practices that we’ve put out here. I’d like to see police agencies mold the procedures instead of legislatures or courts.”
After all, who knows better what cops can do than cops, right? Again, it’s all about the cop.
How big a problem is this? Consider:
In a 2005 study, a University of Michigan Law School professor, Samuel R. Gross, estimated that 340 prisoners sentenced from 1989 to 2003 had been exonerated. Of those, 205 were convicted of murder and 121 of rape. Half of the wrongful murder convictions and 88 percent of the wrongful rape convictions included false eyewitness identification, the study found.
Note that this is about DNA, and the crimes of murder and rape. The problem is that DNA evidence doesn’t impact a whole bunch of crimes, leaving the vast majority a wasteland where the same eyewitness ID evidence that doesn’t work too well in murder and rape to be the primary evidence for putting defendants away. If eyewitness IDs are unreliable, then they are unreliable when DNA is unavailable.
This means that literally tens of thousands of innocent people are likely sitting in cells across the country based on faulty eyewitness IDs and no DNA to save them. Houston, we’ve got a problem.
As the article points out, not all police are antagonistic toward reform, and appreciate that the current system is less than adequate to assure that innocent people aren’t being convicted on bad evidence. But those who view these reforms as “technicalities” rather than tools to separate the innocent from the guilty, even if the cops who arrest them think otherwise, are going to make implementation rough going.
If the police aren’t on board with this whole “not convicting the innocent” thing, then it’s going to troubling to implement and change the practice on the street. Cops are known to testify that they acts in a textbook fashion when, in fact, they did things the way they always have. They will make excuses about whey the confession wasn’t recorded, or what happened in the sequential line-up, or why DNA couldn’t be collected. It’s not that cops are still testilying. But a little fudging here and there, well, gets the job done.
The idea that legislative bodies are coming to grips with their end of the responsibility of reforming criminal justice is an important thing, particularly after two generations of creating new crimes and more inflexible penalties. If they can get the foot soldiers in the war on crime to go along with it, then maybe we’ll have something. It seems the only time they really care is when it’s one of their own. Of course, then, innocence doesn’t matter much to them either.
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