BARRY SCHECK: What went wrong and how can we fix it when there's a total system failure
and that's what the conviction of an innocent is, a total system failure.
BARRY SCHECK: It's just extraordinary.
BARRY SCHECK: The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 and what we do is use DNA testing
to get people out of jail who did not commit the crimes.
It really began for us in a case 1987-88 involving an inmate named Marion Coakley, who was wrongfully
convicted of a robbery-rape in the Bronx.
And in that case, we tried to use DNA testing.
And this was before DNA testing was even in the courts.
It was 1988.
And there was not enough high molecular weight DNA to get a result, but we realized from
that moment that this could be a transformative technology and it would be able to exhonerate
a lot of innocent people and would be able to apprehend the real perpetrators and it
also would shine a window on what we believed were lots of wrongful convictions.
My colleague, Peter Neufeld, and I we actually knew from the very beginning..um..that there
were many many more wrongfully convicted people than anybody believed and that DNA could demonstrate
it.
We knew that.
But obviously, when you live through it and you start seeing this one after another, uh..it's
quite extraordinary.
By the time you see this, there will be 293 post-conviction DNA exonerations, at least,
in the United States.
But remember, and this is really the key to the Innocence Movement and why police, you
know, have been very receptive to some many of our suggestions, is that everytime you've
got the wrong guy, right, and there's a misidentification and a conviction, everytime you do that, the
real perpetrator is out there and will and does commit more crimes.
In our 293 post-conviction DNA exhonerations, 48% of the time, the real perpetrator has
been identified with the DNA and those are frequently instances where there are..the
real perpetrator is someone who has committed more than one rape, more than one murder.
BARRY SCHECK: Only 5% of cases have any biological evidence where you can do a DNA test and determine
identity or guilt or innocence.
So, what about the other 95% of the cases where you have what we know to be the causes
of wrongful convictions: eye witness misidentification, false confessions, unreliable..uh..or fraudulent
forensic science, police or prosecutorial misconduct, defense lawyers that don't do
their job, jailhouse snitches, and of course the most intractable problem, that of racial
bias.
So, we try to take on all of those policy issues and we have an agenda for reform that
includes both state and federal legislation that we've been pretty successful in getting
passed and..uh..we work very closely with police departments, with prosecutors, and
of course with defense lawyers and judges across the country really in an effort to
try to transform the criminal justice system.
And that's something modest.
We've done okay, I mean, there are 55 "Innocence Projects" in the United States.
There are 7 of them abroad.
Thety're forming projects in Taiwan, in China, uh...so..uh...I mean, you know, the influence
of this movement is..uh..that broad then..uh.. it's by no means a failure.
It isn't.
But you know..uh.I get disappointed sometimes because I want things to move faster.
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