The quashing of three wrongful murder convictions is a victory for the extraordinary 'Innocence Project'. Rupert Cornwell reports
It is just possible that Tuesday 4 October 2011 will go down in American legal history. Not for an especially lurid crime, the capture of a most wanted criminal, or a historic ruling by the Supreme Court – but because on that day, in separate corners of the country, three men were released from prison after spending more than six decades behind bars, each convicted of a murder he did not commit.
In Austin, Texas, Michael Morton walked free, exonerated by new DNA tests of killing his wife in 1986. In Chicago, Jacques Rivera left Cook County Jail, having been convicted in 1990 of a gang-related murder on the basis of false evidence from the sole witness to the crime. And in Los Angeles, the 37-year-old Obie Anthony – amazingly bearing no grudges – saw his 1994 murder conviction overturned after it was conclusively shown that the star witness in his case, a pimp, had lied after cutting a deal with prosecutors.
The cases were connected in only two respects. Each was a shocking miscarriage that exposed deep flaws in the way the criminal justice system works in the US. And each of the three men could thank for their release an independent, non-profit body called the Innocence Project, working on the assumption, so easy to articulate but often so hard to translate into deed, that the law must acknowledge when it has made a mistake.
No one knows exactly how many wrongful convictions occur in the US every year, but studies suggest anywhere from 2 to 5 per cent of the country's overall prison population of over 2 million – i.e. anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people – may be innocent.
Source: The Independent, October 6, 2011
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