Criminal Legal News:
Faulty forensics play a major role in causing known wrongful convictions in the United States. Just how big of a role the application of science to justice plays in sending the innocent to prison depends upon your definition of “wrongful convictions.”
The Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating innocent prisoners, focuses on DNA testing and excludes most other types of exonerations from its database. As of August 2020, the Innocence Project database showed 380 people who had been exonerated by DNA testing, 173 (45%) of whom had “invalidated or improper forensic science” as a “contributing cause.”
The National Registry of Exonerations (“NRE”), a database managed by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California at Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School, and Michigan State University College of Law, is more inclusive in its definition of “wrongful convictions” but still requires a “post-conviction, pre-exoneration re-examination of the evidence” showing innocence for an exoneration to be included in the database. It lists 2,657 exonerations occurring between 1989 and August 2020, with 24% of its exonerations showing “False or Misleading Forensic Evidence” as a contributing factor.
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