Over the past 30 years, DNA technology has proven the innocence of nearly 400 prisoners nationwide, including 21 on death row. With incontrovertible biological evidence, it is now undeniable that the U.S. criminal justice system makes egregious mistakes.
Aside from DNA, more aggressive efforts to find new post-conviction evidence, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, have established wrongful convictions and legally exonerated more than 100 Pennsylvania prisoners in the last 30 years, including 11 on death row. Five of the state’s death row exonerations have taken place since 2019.
No one — no matter how tough on crime — wants innocent people imprisoned.
Exonerations will almost certainly grow. Conviction Integrity Units across the country — roughly 35 have been established in the last 15 years — have enabled local prosecutors to investigate problematic past convictions and find shoddy or unethical practices in their own offices.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner runs one of the nation’s most active Conviction Integrity Units. Since Mr. Krasner took office in 2018, investigations by the Philadelphia CIU have secured 26 exonerations involving 25 people. (One man, Christopher Williams, was wrongfully convicted of murder twice and exonerated in both cases.) The Philadelphia unit has become a model for how local prosecutors can aggressively pursue justice by reversing convictions, as well as securing them. Using newly discovered DNA evidence, the unit freed Walter Ogrod in 2020 after he spent 28 years on death row for the 1992 murder of 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn.
“I was fortunate,” Mr. Ogrod said.
But many other innocent men and women languish in state prisons. DNA remains the most surefire way to establish a wrongful conviction and actual innocence. Unfortunately, DNA evidence — taken from saliva, blood, hair or other cells — exists in only a fraction of the cases. Some police departments have even lost or destroyed such evidence.
By extrapolating results from DNA cases to cases without such evidence, criminologists and other experts estimate that from 2% to 5% of the nation’s nearly 2 million prisoners are innocent. With violent crimes, the estimates are even higher.
Two to 5 percent is an excellent error rate for a history exam. But as a rate for incarcerating innocent people, it is horrific. Even the lower rate of 2% would mean Pennsylvania, with a prison population of 37,000, holds more than 700 innocent men and women — a moral travesty that also means a similar number of guilty people remained free.
Mistaken eyewitness identification, reliance on jailhouse informants, false confessions, perjury, poor lawyering, junk science, inattentive judges, and police and prosecutors who withhold evidence or engage in other misconduct are among the many reasons for wrongful convictions. These convictions are difficult — often impossible — to reverse.
Innocence projects in Pennsylvania and other states do admirable work, without charge. For practical reasons, however, they often focus on DNA cases only.
Without DNA evidence, most prisoners must rely on state and federal appeals courts to win freedom or a new trial. Post-conviction appeals, always dicey, are even less likely to prevail today. Among other things, legislation passed during the 1990s shortened filing periods for post-conviction appeals and stiffened standards of proof that defendants must meet to move their cases forward. Appellate judges are also less likely to rule against prosecutors than they were in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Getting innocent people out of prison and keeping others out won’t be easy or cheap. Every county in Pennsylvania should have direct access to a well-funded Conviction Integrity Unit — either one specific to that county or a regional unit that covers several smaller counties.
In 2020, the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, to its credit, launched a statewide Conviction Integrity Unit. Attorney General Josh Shapiro, however, has shown little passion for making the underfunded unit a major player in Pennsylvania’s criminal justice system. Even the unit’s webpage is little more than a news release.
More important, Pennsylvania’s abysmal public defense system, in which local public defender offices operate without state funding or uniform standards, almost assures innocent people will continue to go to prison.
Mr. Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, has supported state funding for local public defenders, but he needs to make improving indigent defense an important and detailed plank in his campaign platform.
For every innocent prisoner in Pennsylvania like Mr. Ogrod who is freed, many more remain in prison. With little hope of freedom, they live in a virtual nightmare that Pennsylvania must do everything it can to end.
First Published: July 27, 2022, 5:09 p.m.
