ARROGANT FLORIDA

There are some 86,000 convicts in your prisons this Christmas Day, good people of Florida. Care to speculate on how many are innocent? Maybe a thousand. Maybe twice that. Florida prison officials used to say that "one-third of the inmates don't belong here, one-third are ready to go, and the rest should never leave." With respect to the first third, they were on to more than they knew. A recent experiment in Virginia implies horrifying numbers.

Gov. Mark Warner last year ordered random DNA testing of forensic samples from old cases in the state's files. It took until now to complete. Among the first 31 reviewed, DNA established the innocence of two men who had finished serving long prison terms for rape. (Warner pardoned them last week and has directed testing in every one of several thousand other cases.) That was 6.5 percent of the testing universe. The same ratio among the 9,000 people serving time in Florida for sexual offenses would mean that nearly 600 of them are innocent. A similarly significant probability applies to convictions for robbery and homicide, which would mean some 1,300 more innocent people on Florida's conscience.

What's worse is how few people give a damn. Even California and Texas, larger states that share Florida's lock-'em-all-up, we-make-no-mistakes style of fighting crime, have provided substantial appropriations to their local Innocence Projects. But in Florida, the one surviving Innocence Project, based in Tallahassee, still depends on voluntary donations and labor to process the hundreds of inmate DNA petitions already on hand.

Nothing is being done in Florida to identify and correct the reasons why the innocent are punished and the guilty go free. National studies have established the causes of wrongful conviction. The most common is mistaken identification by victims and other witnesses, which happened to both of the men Warner pardoned. It figured in 125 of the first 163 DNA exonerations nationwide. That's 77 percent. False confessions, lying co-defendants and jailhouse snitches - like the one who framed Wilton Dedge - and preventable mistakes on the part of police and prosecutors are other significant factors.

"Tunnel vision is insidious," said the report of an official investigation into a wrongful conviction in Manitoba. "It results in the officers becoming so focused upon an individual or an incident that no other person or incident registers in the officer's thoughts." The report recommended annual retraining to guard against this. Tunnel vision, mistaken identification and false confessions figured in Florida's legendary "Quincy Five" case, where five men were charged with murder and two convicted before a tip led defense attorneys to the identities of the real killers.

But there has yet to be the first official investigation of any wrongful Florida conviction, whether Dedge's or any of 21 confirmed death row exonerations. This willful indifference cannot be blamed simply on the Legislature, the governor or the courts. People of Florida, they work for you. When are you going to demand that they do their jobs right? Those of you who are lawyers - "officers of the court," as you so often boast - are twice as responsible. You are the Florida Bar. When will you insist that it act? When are you going to petition the Supreme Court for a commission of inquiry?

Virginia's dramatic example owes to an unsung angel of mercy, the late Mary Jane Burton, a crime laboratory scientist who saved every sample of bloodstained clothing, every semen swab, long before DNA testing was invented. The files came to light in 2001 and prompted Warner's experiment. The significance was its randomness. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, remarked that so high an innocence rate among people who had not asked for testing "should give pause to people who think mistakes in our criminal justice system are flukes." "This should be a beacon for other governors across the country to implement post-conviction DNA testing," he said.

In fact, it needs to be a beacon for much more than DNA testing. There is no DNA evidence in thousands of convictions, particularly for robbery, where it is just as possible that eyewitnesses could be wrong, co-defendants may have lied, or tunnel vision took authorities off the right trail. DNA is a window onto a vast underworld of arrogance, indifference, suffering and shame.

Article here



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)