The release of innocent people from death row and the increasing use of DNA testing are the two biggest reasons behind Americans' growing concern over erroneous convictions, according to a prominent University of Colorado at Boulder criminologist.
Sociology Professor Michael Radelet, one of the nation's leading experts on the death penalty, has edited a special issue of the journal Judicature devoted to the problem of wrongful convictions. Among the 11 authors are famed DNA expert Barry Scheck of the Cardozo School of Law; Robert Olson, chief of the Minneapolis police; and Gerald Kogan, former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court.
Since 1972, more than 100 U.S. inmates have been released from death row, either because of doubts about their guilt or definitive proof of their innocence. "In most cases, evidence of innocence emerged not because 'the system works' but by pure luck," Radelet wrote in his introduction to the journal, published last week.
DNA testing also has clearly demonstrated that innocent people have been convicted.
"While DNA is available for testing in only a small proportion of felony cases, its use in exonerating convicted defendants has confirmed the existence of all sorts of problems, including erroneous eyewitness identification, false confessions, perjury by prosecution witnesses, and a wide assortment of improprieties and shortcomings by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys," he wrote.
"The odds of such blunders in any single case are low, but collectively they lead to a significant (but unknown) number of erroneous convictions."
After a dozen people sentenced to death in Illinois were discovered to be innocent, Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in January 2000 and established the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment to study the death penalty.
Radelet and Boston's Northeastern University criminologist Glenn Pierce were tapped by the commission to examine death sentences in Illinois surrounding the issues of race, gender and geographic location. They studied what distinguishes the 170 people on death row in Illinois from the thousands of others convicted of murder in that state who were not sentenced to death.
They found that, other factors being equal, the odds of a death sentence in Illinois are 60 percent lower for those who kill blacks than for those who kill whites. They also found that, among similar homicides, the odds of a death sentence were 80 percent lower for those who killed in the city of Chicago than for those who killed in rural areas of the state.
Radelet joined the CU-Boulder faculty in fall 2001 and teaches undergraduate and graduate students. He has researched and published extensively on how the death penalty is applied in the United States, and worked personally with each of the last 50 people who were executed in Florida.
He also has worked with undergraduate students to research the history of the death penalty in Colorado, documenting the types of offenses for which people in Colorado have been executed and the race and ethnic characteristics of the defendants and victims. Results of that study are to be published in the CU Law Review in spring 2003.
Judicature is published by the nonpartisan American Judicature Society, which is sponsoring a National Conference on Preventing the Conviction of Innocent Persons Jan. 16-19, in Alexandria, Va. Copies of the September-October symposium issue are $10 each and are available by contacting Rodney Wilson at (312) 357-8821 or rwilson@ajs.org, or by visiting the AJS Web site at .