Actual Innocence

In their book Actual Innocence Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer expose a catastrophic level of failure in the American criminal justice system. The ever-increasing revelations of the innocence of numerous people serving life sentences or awaiting execution on death row leads them, and the reader, to the conclusion that a moratorium on capital punishment is essential. But their book leads to much larger questions than this--and that is its greater purpose. In many of the recent cases in which innocence has been demonstrated it is DNA testing that has been the key to these reversals--and has "exonerated more than 80 prisoners, including eight on death row," in the last seven years (Saletan 27). But other serious problems--including police misconduct, prosecutorial malpractice, a completely misplaced faith in eyewitness accounts, and worse than inadequate defense counsel--have accounted for the rest of the miscarriages of justice that have been corrected, and for many more that have not even been investigated. In addition, although the authors deal almost exclusively with capital crimes their data leads to the inevitable conclusion that if so much is wrong with the very worst cases--which, as a matter of course, are likely to receive the most intense scrutiny--the situation throughout the remainder of the system is at least as bad or, more likely, much worse. In view of the material presented by the authors, therefore, it is not only absolutely necessary that there be a moratoriu

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d to reforming the criminal justice system. The moratorium idea is one that has recently began to receive significant attention. Based on the plain fact that since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the United States in 1976 a total of 87 persons, as of March 2000, have been released from death row the Quixote Center in Maryland began a national Moratorium Now campaign. Other groups supported this goal, such as the American Bar Association which passed a moratorium resolution in 1997. And Senator Patrick Leahy has recently introduced the Innocence Protection Act "to give convicted offenders access to DNA testing and to require that states maintain an effective legal defense system for capital defendants" ("Death" 3). But it took more convincing in the case of Illinois Governor George Ryan whose state had seen ten death-row prisoners released. Ryan passed the first state's moratorium on the death penalty in February 2000, declaring that he could not "support a system, which, in its administration, has proved so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of an innocent life" (quoted in "Death" 3). But the conservative, pro-death penalty governor, whose state was second in

Category: Government - A