Legal Fiction Gives Way To Truth in Pennsylvania

When the Innocence Project takes on a cause, its thrust is to test DNA to show that a convicted defendant may not be guilty.  It invariably begins with a conflict with the legal fiction that a jury cannot be wrong, having determined that a person is guilty. But DNA has broken down that fake wall, forcing us to realize that juries, hard as they may try, get it wrong and convict the innocent.

When the Innocence Project took on the cause of Anthony Wright in Pennsylvania, however, it had an additional stumbling block to address. 

Anthony Wright was convicted of rape and murder in 1993.  Soon after the state passed a bill in 2002 allowing people who have been convicted of a crime access to DNA testing to prove their innocence, Wright asked that he be allowed to perform DNA testing on evidence that was found at the crime scene.  Former Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham claimed that Wright wasn’t entitled to testing because he had confessed to the crime.  The trial court and a state intermediate court agreed and denied the testing. 

It’s one thing to acknowledge that a jury verdict might be wrong.  Indeed, verdicts have always been subject to appellate review, whether for the evidence being legally insufficient or the verdict being against the weight of the evidence. 

But the preclusive affect of a confession is another matter.  The fact of false confessions have presented an extremely problematic issue, particularly where the defense is denied the opportunity to present evidence as to the fact that they happen, how they happen and why they happen, at trial.  The jury is left with the confession and nothing to explain how it’s possible that someone might falsely confess to a crime he didn’t commit. 

Over and over, jurors (and people) assert that they would never do that.  Never.  They refuse to believe it’s possible, and certainly have no reason to believe that a defendant, who has a clear interest in denying his guilt, is telling the truth when he states that his confession was a lie.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, however, held (majority opinion, concurrence, concurrence and dissent) that a confession does not preclude post-conviction DNA testing:

In its decision this week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruled the lower courts and expressly disavowed an earlier intermediate appeals court ruling that was relied upon to deny the testing.  The court acknowledges that the legislature passed the DNA testing law in response to a number of DNA exonerations, including one in which the person cleared by DNA evidence had confessed to the crime.  The court notes that the fact that a confession has been deemed voluntary and admissible at trial does not mean that it is true and says, “We need not be reminded of the countless situations where persons confess to crimes of which they are innocent, either out of desire to cover up for the guilty person or because of a psychological urge to do so.” 

The walls are breaking down around some of the most pernicious legal fictions that protect the prosecution’s “airtight” case from attack.  The problem, however, is that they merely give way to the right to test DNA, the beloved scientific method of proving “actual innocence.” 

This means that the vast majority of cases, where there is no DNA or DNA plays no role in the proof, remain subject to all the same frailties of proof, false confessions, improper identifications, but elude a mechanism to save the innocent defendant from conviction.  If there are “countless situations” where innocent defendants are convicted, then there are countless innocent defendants convicted in non-DNA cases as well.

What remains unacknowledged is that our methodology of trying cases is remarkably imprecise, even though we embrace its infallibility in order to pat ourselves on the back for a grand legal system.  Witnesses lie.  Witnesses make mistakes. Jurors may try very hard to do the right thing, but making sense of testimony, and applying the court’s charge, is extremely difficult.  Nobody to this day knows what beyond a reasonable doubt means, or can convey it in a manner that’s comprehensible.  It’s a mess.

The recognition by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that false confessions do, in fact, happen, and that a confession does not preclude a defendant from obtaining post-conviction DNA testing, it has taken a significant step forward in conceding that jury verdicts are not sacrosanct, that we accept them as a matter of legal necessity, but not because they are true.

We still need to have this recognition trickle down to the trial courts, to open the door to testimony about the limits of memory, junk science, suggestive identifications and false confessions, where now the heavy handed application of relevance and materiality prevents a defendant from offering a jury the ability to break away from their commonly held mistaken beliefs that lead to wrongful convictions.

How great would it be to be able to prevent the wrongful conviction of the innocent at the trial level rather than wait decades for DNA to exonerate them?  How great would it be if we could begin to give the wrongfully accused a chance to defend themselves even when there’s no DNA involved? 

We’re still a long way off from widespread judicial recognition of the flaws of beloved trial evidence and the absolute conclusiveness of a jury verdict, but decisions like this bring us closer to the day when it will trickle down to a trial and be available for use before the jury mistakenly convicts.