Nearly 350 innocent people spent an average of
14 years in prison before the Innocence Project helped set them free.
Barry Scheck has some ideas on how to keep more people from needing his
group's help.
Moving toward DNA evidence instead of other
forensic evidence that can be flawed can help keep innocent people out
of prison, said Scheck, director of the group that works to identify and
free wrongfully convicted prisoners.
But if everyone involved in the criminal
justice system was held to high ethical standards through rules and
laws, the system would be more sound, Scheck said in his Tanner Lecture
on Human Values at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law.
"Good people," he said, "do bad things."
That can include any player in the criminal
justice system, Scheck said as he spoke to an audience that included law
students and defense attorneys, as well as Salt Lake County District
Attorney Sim Gill and U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby.
He also pointed to the center of Moot
Courtroom, where Brandon Moon, a Utah man who was convicted of three
counts of rape in Texas, sat.
Moon served 17 years of a 75-year prison
sentence — much of it fighting his conviction — before he was exonerated
by DNA evidence with the help of the Innocence Project.
"I think that the biggest problem that we have
is ethics," Moon told The Salt Lake Tribune after the speech. When we're
willing to bend the rules a little bit to get a conviction, instead of
looking for the truth, always looking for the truth."
Eyewitness misidentification and unvalidated or
improper forensic science contributed to Moon's wrongful conviction,
which he said routinely occurs across the country.
The Innocence Project, Scheck said, is also
working to increase the use of videotaped interrogations, prevent the
use of informants who have an incentive to provide testimony against a
suspect, and ensure that suspects receive adequate attorney
representation.
He told of a case in Texas, where Michael
Morton spent 24 years in prison for his wife's slaying before he was
exonerated in 2011 by DNA that identified the true killer.
Defense attorneys had asked the judge in the
case to look through the investigative report for potential evidence
that could have prevented Morton's conviction. The judge looked and
found none.
After Morton was exonerated, the Innocence
Project received the report through a public records request and found
that evidence that could have helped Morton during his trial wasn't
included in the file given to the judge. A court later found probable
cause that the former prosecutor concealed evidence during the trial.
The Innocence Project, Scheck said, has worked
to enforce rules for attorneys, on both sides of a case, that require
prosecutors to hand over evidence that could be helpful to a suspect
standing trial.
"It could happen to anybody," Scheck said of a wrongful conviction. "That's really the truth."
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