Authors rap justice system's record on wrongful convictions

By Hope Green

In 1984 Ron Williamson passed some bad checks that nearly cost him his life.

The former minor-league baseball star served a brief spell in an Oklahoma county jail that year for check kiting. A fellow inmate, scheming to reduce her own sentence, concocted a story that Williamson had privately confessed to murdering a young waitress.

Prosecutors believed the jailhouse snitch, and so did the jury. Williamson wound up back behind bars in 1988, this time on death row at Oklahoma State Prison. He suffered from an untreated psychiatric illness, and as his appeals ran out, he hurled himself against the doors of his soundproof cell.

Last year Williamson was released when a pair of crusading lawyers produced incontrovertible evidence clearing his name.

Williamson is one of 38 people freed from prison through the pro bono efforts of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. The longtime colleagues operate the Innocence Project, a New York-based program that employs DNA testing to exonerate wrongfully convicted people.

Describing what they call their "passion for justice," Scheck, Neufeld, and New York Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer recently lectured at BU's School of Law on issues raised in their new book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches from the Wrongfully Convicted (Doubleday, 2000).

Beyond rescuing innocent people languishing in jail, they said, their mission is to understand what went wrong in those cases and prescribe action for a justice system less prone to error.

"We're talking about reforms that we believe prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, Republicans, and Democrats will all agree upon," asserted Scheck, speaking at the annual Max Shapiro Lecture in Trial Advocacy.

"[What] ought to have real viability is the idea of an innocence commission," he said. "When an airplane falls from the sky or a car blows up, or there's an unexpected death in a hospital, we bring in an institution like the National Transportation Safety Board to do a post-mortem. What went wrong? Did somebody make a mistake? Is it a system error? Is it nobody's fault? But most important of all, what can we do to fix this, to minimize the risk it will ever happen again?"

Such troubleshooting, Scheck said, "happens in every institution in this country -- except the criminal justice system."

Scheck is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, where he cofounded the Innocence Project with Neufeld in 1992. Among his better-known cases, Scheck assisted O.J. Simpson's defense team in 1995 and represented British au pair Louise Woodward, whose second-degree murder charge in the 1997 shaking death of 8-month-old Newton, Mass., infant Matthew Eappen was later reduced to manslaughter.

Neufeld has a private practice in Manhattan. He and Scheck have both dabbled in screenwriting over the years; Neufeld was a researcher for the 1978 feature film Days of Heaven.

Dwyer, who won the Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1995, met the pair when he covered their first DNA exoneration case for Newsday.

In their book, the authors analyze 62 proven cases of wrongful incarceration in the United States and identify typical lapses in judgment or professional competence that got the wrong people locked up. Mistaken eyewitness identification was a critical factor in 84 percent of the cases, they write, and all too often the error happened when a white person misidentified a black man. False confessions, whether coerced or falsely attributed by a police officer, were key in more than 20 percent of the cases.

Half of the instances involved misconduct by lawyers. "We're talking about defense attorneys who were simply asleep at the wheel, not caring about their clients' interests, and not doing the necessary work to give an effective defense," said Neufeld.

New York Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer, coauthor of Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches from the Wrongfully Convicted, signs a copy of the book for Laurie Ford (LAW'00), after Dwyer and lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld lectured on their campaign for criminal justice reform. Photo by Fred Sway

About a third of the cases, he added, went awry in "sloppy forensic science and flat-out scientific fraud, people who simply fabricated data in order to get a conviction."

The authors recommend more state programs to investigate wrongful imprisonment claims, with or without DNA evidence, and what Neufeld calls "rational, simple, sane reforms" in arrest and evidence-gathering procedures.

When police trot out a row of suspects before a witness, for example, the detective in charge of the session is often the same person assigned to investigate the case. "That doesn't make any sense," Neufeld said, because a detective with a preexisting hunch can inadvertently cue the victim.

Police lineups should instead be run by a neutral professional who is not part of the investigation, he added. A second corrective would be to bring out the suspects one at a time, rather than in a group, and reassure the victim that the investigation will continue if no one is identified that day.

The lawyers also urge police to video- or audiotape all statements from a witness or suspect, a policy instituted in Alaska, Minnesota, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.

Neufeld and Scheck have distributed their recommendations to law enforcement agencies around the country. Emphasizing that their current whistle-stop tour is aimed at promoting a "national innocence network" rather than just their book, the speakers urged their BU audience to join their quest for justice.

"If you get a taste for justice," Sheck told the students and their professors, "you'll like it and come back for more."