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 moratorium on capital punishment, there must also be serious study of how and why the system is fails so many people and adequate steps must be taken to correct the problems.
The authors provide a few chapters on general topics such as the emergence of DNA testing as a vital tool in criminal law and the developing understanding of the unreliability of eyewitnesses. But for the most part they tell the stories of ten men who were convicted of capital crimes and were late...