DNA Evidence: The Innocence Project

The Innocence Project, using DNA evidence, has gone back to past cases and exonerated innocent people when they were wrongly convicted. There may be many reasons that several people are wrongly convicted every year. However, there are 6 reasons deemed as the most important regarding wrongful convictions. These reasons are eyewitness misidentification, unvalidated or improper forensic science, false confessions or admissions, government misconduct, informants or snitches, and bad lawyering (understand the causes).

Eyewitness misidentification is the most common cause of wrongful convictions in the United States, having a factor in almost 75% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing (understand the causes). Some common causes of misidentification include knowledge of a different potential suspect, making a selection because the eyewitness thought the subject looked somewhat similar to the actual suspect, or the eyewitness was placed in poor conditions to make an identification (understand the causes). Two important variables that affect this decision are estimator variables, which cannot be controlled by the criminal justice system such as race or presence of weapons, and system variables, which can be controlled the criminal justice system, like fillers in a lineup or the instructions given to an eyewitness (understand the causes).

Along with eyewitness identification, unreliable forensic science has been the cause of around 50% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing (understand the causes). There are three factors that lead to unreliable or improper forensic science. They are the absence of scientific standards, improper forensic testimony, and forensic misconduct (understand the causes). The absence ...

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...dent by trial that Matthews was the victim (Travis Hayes). A confidence statement signed at the initial procedure would have shown that the eyewitness had the same misgivings about the description of the suspect matching Matthews that his lawyers had during the trial.

Any of these reforms, if they had been done during Hayes’s and Matthews’s cases, could have prevented their wrongful convictions concerning the murder. Between interrogation reform and eyewitness reform, any change in the direction of validating what actually occurred or making sure information was presented in an unbiased manner would have shown great differences in what happened to these two men. These two individuals, wrongly convicted due to two of the six main faults in the process, are now part of 16 exonerated cases from the Innocence project that involved two people accused of a single crime.