TheLoop21.com

By: Devona Walker (Add to your loop)
Mon, 03/16/2009 - 00:00

Herman Atkins, at age 21, was wrongfully convicted for raping a woman in Riverside County, California. He was later exonerated.

(Read more about the wrongly convicted.)

Well below the national radar, a network of legal advocates, family members of the wrongfully convicted, college students and lawyers have been fighting local and state authorities to have DNA evidence examined.

They say this technology could exonerate thousands of Americans currently serving prison sentences for crimes they did not commit. In fact, more than 400 people have already been exonerated by a very limited amount of DNA testing. On average, those innocent people served more than 12 years before being released.

“You got all these judges, these police officers and these lawyers. And everybody’s just protecting everybody else,” said Tonja Brown, who has been working for 16 years to prove her brother’s innocence in a 1988 robbery and sexual assault conviction. “They just want to bury it. They just want to bury him. They don’t want anyone to know the truth.”

“They don’t even care that the real criminal is still out there,” said the woman from Nevada, where DNA evidence is only used in death penalty cases.

Many cases involving the use of DNA sound very similar to Brown’s, according to Jeff Chinn, associate director of The California Innocence Project. Local district attorneys often arbitrarily deny requests to test DNA in post-conviction cases. Even though the science is now available to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, they often do not want to jeopardize the finality of criminal verdicts. This prevents family members from getting closure about their loved one's conviction.

Then, even when tests are allowed, often times the original evidence is either missing or compromised. Chinn believes these prevailing facts, in addition to lack of manpower and funding surrounding the issue, ensure we are only exonerating a fraction of the innocent. The process is so cumbersome and disadvantageous to the convicted, he says, it is nearly impossible to determine the extent of the problem.

“How rampant is the problem? We don’t know,” Chinn said. “There are flaws in the way that identifications are done. There are flaws in the way that investigations are done. Not everything shows up in every exoneration. But most of these convictions are based on witness identification and most of it is cross racial.”

For the lucky few who are exonerated, the complications continue. Twenty-nine states do not offer compensation. And apologies, according to Chinn, are even more difficult to come by.

Last week, for some reason, the U.S. Supreme Court remained divided on conducting post-conviction DNA tests. Justice Antonin Scalia even went so far as to say it threatened to open a floodgate for prisoners looking to “game the system.”

This country has begun to address a few of the many problems it has shuddered to acknowledge for decades.