Robert Miller Crime Essay

In today’s society, it seems criminality runs rampant. The sheer number of people who become incarcerated each year is staggering, and growing. Aside from the outrageous costs for housing these offenders, it becomes increasingly difficult to decipher the true nature of the crime committed and whether or not the suspect in question is the culprit. This concept begs the question, are all of the people currently incarcerated actually guilty of the crimes they allegedly committed? This idea serves as the foundation for the structure of the book Actual Innocence, where it is found that people frequently become wrongly convicted of heinous crimes on the basis of illegitimate confession, white coat fraud, prosecutorial misconduct, snitch evidence

and junk science. These wrongful convictions, as shown by the book, can be proved in their inaccuracy by the mere presence of DNA at the crime scenes, so it is important for states to consider mandatory DNA testing before convicting a suspect of a crime and sentencing them to prison and/or the death penalty.
In the year 1987 a man named Robert Miller, who was known to abuse drugs on a frequent basis, was sentenced to death for the crime of multiple rapes and murders of elderly women in Oklahoma.

At the time, the case began with his confession, where Miller relayed to police that he had a psychic connection to the person who had committed the crimes. Upon hearing this information, police subjected him to twelve hours of interviewing where Miller gave an inconsistent recount of the crimes he had witnessed through his “visions”. Shortly thereafter, it was quickly concluded that Miller was guilty of all the crimes despite the fact that his mind was most likely altered from overindulgence on drugs and his psychic visions cannot be counted as concrete evidence. It wasn’t until later in 1991-1993 that DNA testing proved that Miller was definitely not the rapist, as his DNA was not a match with the fluids consistent at the scene. This however, did not guarantee his immediate release from prison, because he did not become free until

1998.
For this specific case, the idea of illegitimate confession was utilized to the point of acceptance without evidence. Robert Miller’s confessions carried such a heavy weight in the decision making process, that it effectively replaced the concrete science of actual DNA evidence and landed him in jail despite the fact that he was innocent. Because states did not mandate DNA testing for criminals of heinous crimes at the this point in time, Robert Miller served his jail time for a crime he only associated with through a fluke psychic bond. Had DNA testing been mandatory, his status as a suspect would have most likely been dismissed in court as it is not possible, for someone whose DNA is not a match, to have been the culprit at the scene of the crime.
Similarly, in a case also set in 1987, two men-Ronald Williamson and Dennis Fritz-were accused of a violent rape and murder.

A woman in the Oklahoma jail nearby claimed to have eavesdropped on a conversation pertaining to the case. In this conversation it was speculated that both Williamson and Fritz had admitted to committing the heinous crimes and were promptly sentenced to death (Williamson) and a life sentence (Fritz). This type of snitch evidence accounts for 21% of the innocent project cases where no legitimate DNA evidence is founded. The only proof used in the case against these men was their hair, each being fairly “consistent” with the hair found at the scene of the crime. Updated testing for DNA later on had shown that none of the hairs found at the scene of the crime bore any resemblance to either Robert Williamson or Dennis Fritz dubbing the previously approved match a 100% error

rate.
Perhaps one of the most common forms of wrongful conviction stems from prosecutorial misconduct. It accounts for more than 63% of cases where it is the fault of the investigators and prosecutors involved in the case if their client is wrongfully convicted. In the book Actual Innocence the case of Ronald Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez is also brought forth for discussion. They were both accused of rape and murder of a child and prosecutors kept declining to take on their case. Before the charges were dropped several years later, three prosecutors and four sheriff investigators associated with the case were brought to court for obstruction of justice and perjury but received no punishment. This is quite common in the justice system as 381 different cases have been reversed in response to the way the case is handled by both prosecutors and sheriff investigators from 1963 to today.
In examples of other forms of misconduct such as “white coat fraud” situations include cases where experts giving their opinion on the scientific portion of evidence, are falsifying information when they are called upon to give testimony. One such person convicted of “white coat fraud” is Fred Zain. Fred Zain was often utilized as someone giving expert testimony in cases pertaining to blood and other DNA samples being matched to the suspects in question. When he was finally investigated in 1993 it was found that the majority of his performed tests could not be considered reliable because they would not have helped him attain the conclusions he used in court, nor were 100% of the tests performed at all. Because of the fact that many cases bring in the opinions of others claiming expert testimony, it tends to have significant sway on jury members and their final decisions despite them having no way of knowing whether or not the qualifications of the person giving the testimony are legitimate.
Throughout my reading, I found that a common theme for each of these cases involving heinous crimes was that no DNA testing was initially performed-which lead to conviction-however later on when update forms of testing were made available, those same people that got convicted were found to be innocent. While this is not true for all cases, as some people found guilty are rightfully so, there is a high percentage of cases who follow the pattern of wrongful conviction. Because of this, I believe that it should be necessary for each state to mandate DNA testing on the accused and convicted alike, because it is a waste of time, money and effort to keep someone incarcerated who does not deserve it and you cannot give those years spent in jail back to that person. It would be one step closer to helping the legal system become more just.