Will US governments act to develop standards?

Protect the innocent
Updated: October 03, 2009
The horrific problem of wrongful conviction has finally secured a foothold in Congress, where the Senate Judiciary Committee last month focused its attention on what amounts to rock-solid proof that an innocent man was put to death in the United States.
The State of Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 for setting a fire that killed his three children. But a report in the Sept. 7 issue of The New Yorker destroyed the case and, in a later television interview, even the judge admitted that "without question" the scientific evidence was not valid. Yet Willingham is dead.
The hearing, according to The Innocence Project, made clear that bipartisan support exists for "science-based federal forensic standards." That would be a critical development, but since most criminal cases occur in state, not federal, courts, it will be imperative that when and if those standards are developed, they are adopted in states where inadequate forensic standards can land innocent men and women in the penitentiary.
But bad science is only part of the problem of wrongful conviction and in New York, which has one of the worst records for fixing the problems that ensnare innocent people, other issues are more critical. They include eyewitness misidentification and false confessions. Albany knows about these issues, yet it is dragging its feet on fixing them.
The problem of wrongful conviction hit Western New York like a hurricane a few years ago, when first Anthony Capozzi and then Lynn DeJac were found to be innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. Since then, The Buffalo News published a five-part editorial page series on the matter and, just this year, the New York State Bar Association issued an in-depth report on this crisis in criminal justice.
Over the summer, the issue seemed to gain traction in the State Legislature, but because of the Senate's leadership fight or legislative indifference or some other reason, nothing has been done. The problems that wrongfully sent Capozzi to prison as the Delaware Park rapist and DeJac as the murderer of her 13-year-old daughter remain in place.
Those problems � eyewitness misidentification, tainted witnesses and faulty science � can be addressed. So can false confessions, the head-spinning phenomenon of innocent people admitting to crimes they didn't commit. The way police departments conduct lineups can make a difference. Video recording of interrogations can make a difference. The admissibility of testimony by informants with charges pending against them can make a difference. But New York cannot bring itself to act.
Other states have taken up this cause, which is, at root, a matter of not only justice but public safety. When the wrong person is convicted of a crime, the real criminal is often left to continue preying on the innocent. That's what happened when Capozzi was convicted. That left Altemio C. Sanchez not just to continue raping women in Western New York, but to start murdering them.
With Washington now starting to pay attention to the problem of wrongful conviction, perhaps the laggard states, including New York, will be moved to act. Even if lawmakers don't care that innocent people are behind bars, they could at least pretend.

Find this article at: http://www.buffalonews.com/149/story/816853.html