Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Sometimes sorry isn't good enough
The pope's vague act of contrition does nothing to address the Vatican's pro-war policies.
By Colman McCarthy
[03/15/00]

Drug money
With our foreign policy toward Colombia hogtied by campaign finance and business interests, the war on drugs could be better waged against Washington.
By Arianna Huffington
[03/15/00]

Paranoid city
Belgrade is gripped by rumors that NATO is about to begin bombing again.
By Laura Rozen
[03/15/00]

Fresh feathers, Mr. Safire?
You always wanted to have your crow and eat it too on the Clinton scandals, so now it's time for you to keep your word.
By Joe Conason
[03/14/00]

Pink pistols
The gay movement often portrays homosexuals as helpless victims. Here's an alternative: Arm them.
By Jonathan Rauch
[03/13/00]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

As the tally grew during the past 15 years, anti-death-penalty forces were made impotent by the get-tough-on-crime movement that swept through America during the high-crime era of the Reagan administration. And when Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president, many opponents of capital punishment lost their political home. Clinton, after all, had overseen four executions during his tenure as Arkansas governor -- including that of Ricky Ray Rector, who had shot himself in the head after killing a cop and was so brain-damaged that at his last meal he asked whether he could save his pecan pie for a snack after his execution.

These days, candidates for national office brag about how many people they've executed and how quickly. Democrat Al Gore is on the record as supporting capital punishment, and Republican George W. Bush has presided over 121 executions as Texas governor.

Despite the absence of a major death penalty debate on the political stage, the tide of public opinion has begun to change. Though two-thirds of Americans are still in favor of capital punishment, support is at its lowest since 1981. A major factor in this change is the rising number of wrongly convicted prisoners or death-row inmates who have been set free after DNA fingerprinting technology produced evidence supporting their innocence. Since 1986, 67 prisoners have been released, including eight on death row.

The technology that led to many of these exonerations also inspired the work of the Innocence Project -- a network of attorneys and students that has taken up hundreds of cases in an effort to reverse unjust convictions. "Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, And Other Dispatches From The Wrongly Convicted," written by Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim Dwyer, documents the work of a group that has crusaded effectively to restore the American justice system.

In an interview at Salon's Washington bureau, Dwyer and Scheck (who served as O.J. Simpson's defense attorney) discussed the project's groundbreaking work.

Why did you start the Innocence Project?

Barry Scheck: Peter Neufeld and I used to be public defenders in the South Bronx. We were referred a case from our old public defenders office of someone who had been convicted of a crime, but everyone believed he was innocent. He was actually at a prayer meeting [at the time of the crime]. This was in 1988, before anybody had heard of DNA testing, but we had, and we tried to get a DNA test. There wasn't enough sample and we wound up being able to prove him innocent in other ways. But it led us into this whole area of DNA testing.

We realized that this is remarkable tool both to identify people who had really committed the crimes and exonerate people who had already been convicted ... you could go back and look at the evidence 10, 20, 30 years later. So we founded this clinical program at Cardozo Law School. Inmates would write to us and say, "I'm innocent," and we'd see if there was biological evidence that could be tested to prove them innocent. Unfortunately, in 75 percent of cases the evidence is lost or destroyed. Nonetheless, we have represented or assisted in representation of 38 individuals who have been exonerated with DNA tests, eight on death row. Overall, there have been 64 people exonerated in the United States and six in Canada.

Do you turn away a lot of cases?

Scheck: Literally thousands. We're a small entity with limited funds. What we're doing now is going to law schools and journalism schools across the country and trying to get people involved in what we are calling the Innocence Network. A lot of law schools have come to the fore now and are taking these cases on -- not just DNA cases, but also cases involving misconduct or wrongful convictions where there's no DNA evidence. We're interested in [finding] people who have been convicted, but are innocent. What our book does is go through all the causes of wrongful convictions -- mistaken identification, junk science, fraudulent forensic science, race problems, false confessions, jail-house snitches, bad lawyers -- and systematically suggest solutions that Democrats, Republicans, prosecutors and defense lawyers can all get behind.

Next page | For every seven people we execute, one person is taken off death row