The following op-ed by Andy Hoover was published by PennLive
on May 11, 2016.
Last month, the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association
released its new guidelines on witness interviews and photo lineups to prevent
wrongful convictions.
With simultaneous press conferences in various areas of the
state, the PDAA suggested it is serious about reforms to be sure that they are
getting the right person during investigations.
It was not a difficult trail for the DAs to walk. This path
was blazed nearly a decade ago by advocates, academics, lawyers, and other
politicians.
In 2006, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Stewart
Greenleaf, R-Montgomery, proposed a
novel idea when he introduced a resolution to create an advisory committee to
study why innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes and what are best
practices for diminishing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.
At the time, the reality of innocent people in America's
prisons had penetrated the national conscience.
Seven years earlier, Illinois halted its death penalty after
it was revealed that the state had freed more innocent people from its death
row than it had executed.
Several years after that, Greenleaf led an effort to loosen
Pennsylvania law to give inmates with legitimate innocence claims greater
access to DNA testing. That law led to the exoneration of several people who
had served years in prison, including one man who had spent over 20 years on
death row.
Studying root causes of wrongful convictions and fixing the
criminal justice system to decrease the chances of it happening seemed
non-controversial.
But when the committee started its work in 2007, the
District Attorneys' association tried to undermine its legitimacy before it
could even get started. At a press conference with then-District Attorney Lynne
Abraham of Philadelphia, prosecutors complained about the make-up of the
committee.
Never mind that the committee included Abraham and four
other sitting district attorneys, including Ed Marsico of Dauphin County; Frank
Fina of the Attorney General's office; two former attorneys general; Victim Advocate
Carol Lavery and two other victims' rights activists; two chiefs of police; a
retired FBI agent; and several former prosecutors.
The committee's work took four long years but, in 2011, it
released its report, a 316-page tome that thoroughly analyzed the causes of
wrongful convictions and offered a series of recommendations to fix the
problem.
The committee's recommendations included greater
preservation of biological evidence, changes in witness interviews and photo
lineups, state-based funding for indigent defense services, video and audio
recording of interrogations, and compensation for people who are wrongly
convicted.
Unfortunately, law enforcement, led by the District
Attorneys' association, released its own minority report.
That report diminished the committee's recommendations and
refused to even acknowledge the reality of innocent people in prison.
Signers of the report included Marsico, Fina, Allegheny
County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, and Philadelphia District Attorney
Seth Williams, who had been elected to replace Abraham in the interim.
Perhaps most appalling of all, the minority report called
the idea of compensating wrongly convicted people "preposterous."
Compensation for innocent people who are convicted of crimes is probably not
preposterous to Han Tak Lee.
Lee spent 24 years in state prison for a cabin fire in
Monroe County that killed his daughter. His conviction was based on junk arson
science.
Released in 2014 and now 81, Lee lost years of his life and
now lives on public assistance and generous donations from a support group. A
New York Times profile on Lee in March highlighted the negative impact of his
incarceration on his mental health.
Lee isn't the only person who would benefit from a law to
compensate the wrongly convicted. Through dogged investigative journalism, the
late Pete Shellem of The Patriot News freed several Pennsylvanians who were
serving life sentences.
After the committee released its report, legislation was
introduced to implement many of its recommendations. The legislation went
nowhere, largely as a result of the minority report from law enforcement.
Since then, the legislative effort to provide greater
protections to stop wrongful convictions has had its starts and stops.
Bills to lengthen deadlines for introducing new evidence
after conviction, to appropriate state funding to train public defenders, and
to allow police to record interrogations without legal entanglements have
stalled in the face of opposition from law enforcement.
There is every reason to believe that the commonwealth's
district attorneys want to prevent the conviction of innocent people.
When that happens, an innocent person sits in prison while a
guilty person continues to walk the streets. But to take District Attorneys'
association newfound effort to implement best practices seriously, it has to be
a more serious partner on reform.
It's nice that the district attorneys got religion on
wrongful convictions. Many of us are left with a simple question: What took you
so long?
Andy Hoover is the legislative director of the American
Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
