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chrisiant 's review for:
Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right
by Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck
First things first, if inspiration for righteous indignation is not what you're looking for in reading material, look elsewhere. Second, the book is fifteen years old, so the landscape on this issue has changed a bit since this was written (for one thing, 49 states now have DNA access laws, which was not the case in 1999).
That said, this book does a really fantastic job of telling the story of what it was like as DNA testing became a possibility for proving innocence in courts of law. The authors lay out the main places where our criminal justice system was (still is, I imagine) failing to locate and convict guilty parties of crime. The authors discuss the (un)reliability of eyewitness identification and prison snitches, police and prosecutorial misconduct of heinous degree and frequency, issues with ineffective counsel, and the overall attitude of society and legislators of actively burying our heads in the sand and not noticing or doing anything about these problems. They do this through case studies of wrongfully convicted folks who served various sentences, some of them more than a decade, some on death row, before being proven innocent through DNA testing that, in most cases, was unavailable during their initial trials.
The most striking part for me was that as DNA testing of evidence became more prevalent and began proving the innocence of convict after convict, no one seemed to want to talk about how that might suggest broader problems with our systems of investigating and prosecuting crime. Not all crimes involve DNA to be tested. If DNA evidence is showing we were wrong in all these cases where it existed, is it really plausible that we weren't wrong in some of the cases without DNA evidence to test? Where and how did we go wrong? How can we change police/prosecutor/jury procedure so we don't get it wrong as often?
The authors, 2 of whom started the Innocence Project in 1992, have suggestions in each chapter for how reforms can be made to the particular problem that chapter addresses. The reforms are also collected in a reference section at the back of the book. I love when non-fiction authors go beyond identifying and exploring a problem to making suggestions for how to fix it. It seems like that step gets left out too often.
The downside about the reference section is that the info is pretty out-of-date, but the good news is that some of the suggested reforms have been enacted in some states since then. There are also many state-specific innocence projects now, all with websites, and while it appears the need is still overwhelming the resources, there does seem to be more national attention on this issue now than there was fifteen years ago, and some positive legislative change since this book was written.
That said, this book does a really fantastic job of telling the story of what it was like as DNA testing became a possibility for proving innocence in courts of law. The authors lay out the main places where our criminal justice system was (still is, I imagine) failing to locate and convict guilty parties of crime. The authors discuss the (un)reliability of eyewitness identification and prison snitches, police and prosecutorial misconduct of heinous degree and frequency, issues with ineffective counsel, and the overall attitude of society and legislators of actively burying our heads in the sand and not noticing or doing anything about these problems. They do this through case studies of wrongfully convicted folks who served various sentences, some of them more than a decade, some on death row, before being proven innocent through DNA testing that, in most cases, was unavailable during their initial trials.
The most striking part for me was that as DNA testing of evidence became more prevalent and began proving the innocence of convict after convict, no one seemed to want to talk about how that might suggest broader problems with our systems of investigating and prosecuting crime. Not all crimes involve DNA to be tested. If DNA evidence is showing we were wrong in all these cases where it existed, is it really plausible that we weren't wrong in some of the cases without DNA evidence to test? Where and how did we go wrong? How can we change police/prosecutor/jury procedure so we don't get it wrong as often?
The authors, 2 of whom started the Innocence Project in 1992, have suggestions in each chapter for how reforms can be made to the particular problem that chapter addresses. The reforms are also collected in a reference section at the back of the book. I love when non-fiction authors go beyond identifying and exploring a problem to making suggestions for how to fix it. It seems like that step gets left out too often.
The downside about the reference section is that the info is pretty out-of-date, but the good news is that some of the suggested reforms have been enacted in some states since then. There are also many state-specific innocence projects now, all with websites, and while it appears the need is still overwhelming the resources, there does seem to be more national attention on this issue now than there was fifteen years ago, and some positive legislative change since this book was written.