"Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent"by Jim and Nancy Petro. Jim is a former Attorney General of Ohio. See the review of this book by Steven Weinberg, "Eight Myths of Justice".
He wrote:
In the
2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Kansas v. March, Justice David Souter
and Justice Antonin Scalia conducted a public debate within their
opposing written opinions. Discussing the fates of death row prisoners,
Souter opined that in such high stakes cases, innocent men and women
are too often found guilty.
The
“unusually high incidence of false conviction” is probably caused by
“the combined difficulty of investigating without help from the
victim, intense pressure to get convictions in homicide cases, and the
corresponding incentive for the guilty to free the innocent,” Souter
wrote.
Scalia countered that wrongful convictions are rare in capital
cases because they “are given especially close scrutiny at every
level, which is why in most cases many years elapse before the
sentence is executed.”
For 40 years, I have researched, written about and obsessed over
wrongful convictions. Souter’s thinking—heavily reliant on the
research of Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor who
has demonstrated that wrongful convictions are more prevalent than
most law enforcement insiders understand—is spot-on. Scalia’s is
misguided, informed by a judicial culture more interested in speedy
convictions than thorough investigations.
The law enforcement personage who recognizes the problem of false
convictions is a rare and refreshing breed—and often comes from
unlikely corners of the political ring. Republican politician Jim
Petro, experienced an epiphany during his term as Ohio attorney general
that surprised him, his wife Nancy and many of his supporters. The
epiphany? Petro realized that a significant number of prisoners who
say they are innocent are indeed innocent. He realized that wrongful
convictions occur in multiple Ohio county courthouses and in federal
courts. He realized that the number of wrongful convictions can be
minimized, and that police, prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys
can perform their jobs better. His new found cause was well suited to
his law-and-order way of thinking—when wrongful convictions occur, the
actual perpetrators (murderers, rapists, burglars, etc.) go unpunished,
and often murder or rape or burglarize again.
In my years of research, I have heard only a few prosecutors
acknowledge the breadth and depth of the problem. In his new book
False Justice: Eight Myths That Convict the Innocent (January,
Kaplan), Petro outdoes them all.
Most of the cases that raised red flags for Petro, and now benefit
from his lawyering, are Ohio cases. Petro was especially gripped by
the cases of Clarence Elkins, Michael Green and Roger Dean Gillispie,
convicted felons whose exonerations in Ohio are completed or pending. Petro and his wife, a business consultant, rely heavily on the
Elkins, Green and Gillispie case studies in hope of dispelling eight
“myths” about the criminal justice system:
•Everyone in prison claims innocence. Most inmates make no such claim
because guilt is obvious. Lots of prisoners complain about police
cutting corners or prosecutors offering overly harsh plea bargain terms,
but rarely do they deny their crime completely.
•The American criminal justice system almost never convicts an
innocent person. Nobody can know the census of innocent inmates. But
hundreds of documented cases exist, and Petro, among others, suggests
the number reaches into the tens of thousands.
•Only the guilty confess. False confessions show up in at least one quarter of documented wrongful convictions.
•Wrongful conviction is the result of innocent human error. Numerous
cases have yielded evidence that police and prosecutors had reason to
doubt the validity of the arrest, but made the arrest anyway.
•An eyewitness is the best testimony. Sometimes that is true, but
numerous well-designed research studies suggest the odds of accurate
eyewitness identification are no better than 50-50.
•Conviction errors get corrected on appeal. Appellate judges tend to
side with the prosecution because finality is an overwhelming value
within the court system.
•It dishonors the victim to question a conviction. In fact, many
victims and their loved ones want the actual perpetrators to serve
prison time.
•If the justice system has problems, the pros will fix them. In
researching the more than 2,300 criminal justice jurisdictions across
the United States, I have found that the pros almost never initiate
the repairs. Instead, those repairs begin with innocence project
advocates, journalists through their public investigations, law
professors, and the rare state legislators and public officials willing
to buck against the criminal justice establishment.
Any well-informed primer on wrongful convictions is welcome. Even
better is a primer by somebody like Petro, who has the credentials to
move reform proposals to center stage.