Hello Freedomphiles!  My hero, Radley Balko is at it again.  This time he has written a piece for Fox News about all the wrongful convictions that have happened.  There have been 200 convictions overturned by new DNA evidence.  That may not seem like a lot, but Radley explains:

It's true that 200 don't seem like a large number, particularly when you consider how many cases make their way through U.S. courts each day. But not every criminal case involves biological evidence.

Typically, only murder and rape cases do, and even within those cases, conditions need to be just right. It needs to be a case where the biological evidence available was critical in securing a conviction.

The evidence needs to have been preserved, and still in a condition that's testable. Factor in all of this, and the pool of cases available for DNA testing shrinks considerably, and that 200 plus figure starts to become a significant proportion of the total cases under consideration.

It certainly does.  He goes on to talk about an article published in the Columbia Law Review that examined 200 cases that were overturned, and certain patterns emerged:

False eyewitness testimony was the overwhelming factor (79 percent of the cases), followed by faulty forensic science (55 percent), and false testimony from informants working for the police (18 percent).

In 16 percent of the cases, the defendant actually falsely confessed to the crime. False confessions are common among young and mentally ill suspects, particularly when subjected to harsh interrogation from police.

More troubling was what Garret found in the appeals process.

Many people wrongly assume appeals courts serve as a kind of backup for trial courts, guarding against innocent people slipping through the system. In truth, appeals courts rarely consider the actual guilt or innocence of a criminal defendant.

Most of the time, they address procedural matters relating to how the trial was administered, whether the judge issued appropriate rulings regarding evidence and witnesses, and whether the state properly protected the defendant's constitutional rights.

Garret found that of the 200 people convicted for crimes for which they were later exonerated, just eighteen were granted reversals by the appellate courts.

Of the rest, 67 had their appeals denied with no written ruling at all. In 63 cases, the appellate court's opinion referred to the defendant's guilt. In 12 other cases, it referred to the "overwhelming" evidence of guilt.

In the remaining cases, the appeals courts either found the defendant's appeal without merit, or found some merit in his claims, but found that the trial court's errors were "harmless," or unlikely to have affected the jury's verdict.

Keep in mind, these are all cases in which the defendant was later determined to be actually innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. More alarmingly, Garret found in his research of these 200 cases that "even after DNA testing became available, courts and law enforcement also posed obstacles to conducting DNA testing, and then denied relief even after DNA proved innocence."

Many were convicted despite DNA testing pointing to their innocence, and 41 had to rely on the mercy of a governor's pardon power because, despite their proven innocence, they had already exhausted their appeals, and could make no further claims in court.

"Thus for some," Garret concludes. "Even once DNA evidence exonerated them, our judicial system was unwilling or unable to provide a remedy."

Garret's study is chilling.

Sweet Jeebus, terrifying would be a more accurate term, Radley.