Pros And Cons Of Dna Exoneration

I would say I support DNA conviction and exoneration cases today, but wouldn’t say a decade or two ago. The Innocence Projects reports that since 1989, there have been 330 cases where the inmate has been exonerated from prison based on DNA evidence—twenty of these individuals were death row inmates. The average time that a person that has been exonerated by DNA evidence spends in prison before being let out? Fourteen years of freedom gone. Playing devil’s advocate though, I attribute this to the fact that technology starting out during DNA testing was obviously not at the same level we have today and thus, mistakes were made—to be exact, about forty-seven percent of these wrongful convictions handed down were found to be wrong following

DNA testing. I feel as though today, if we do a series of tests and confirmatory tests before handing down convictions, we can be certain we are handing down proper sentencing to offenders. I would even suggest taking it a step further and that, prior to death row inmates being executed, another series of tests be run to ensure that an innocent man is not executed.
It is important though to realize that not all exoneration cases were just because of bad DNA testing—in fact, in some cases, DNA testing overturned convictions. Twenty-eight percent of the exonerated cases were the result of false statements given to police where the suspect was proved innocent following DNA testing after their conviction—an example of this is seventy-one of a hundred and thirteen homicide cases had a suspect exonerated based on DNA testing. Another area DNA testing has disproved a suspects guilt is jailhouse informants who try to get out of custody sooner by helping authorities—here one can assume that these individuals will say any name to get out. With jailhouse informants, about fifteen percent of the cases were tossed. A final category that comes to mind with trials is eyewitness testimony. We all know that eyewitness testimony has been proven to be ineffective, but we still allow for it in court. In terms of DNA exonerations, seventy percent of cases where the eyewitness testimony was not correct was later found on DNA testing and the accused being released from custody as a result.