Farron Cousins is joined by Mark Godsey, professor at University of Cincinnati College of Law and director of The Ohio Innocence Project, to discuss what is being done to help innocent people who have been wrongfully convicted.
Transcript:
Farron Cousins:
Yeah, there’s absolutely no question whatsoever that the justice system in the United States is deeply flawed. Not only are we allowing white collar criminals to get away with murder and sometimes that’s quite literal, but the rate at which innocent people are going to prison should give every law abiding citizen a reason to be worried. Joining me now to discuss the problem of wrongful convictions is Mark Godsey. He’s the author of the new book Blind Injustice, a law professor at University of Cincinnati, director of the Innocence Project of Ohio. Mark, thank you for joining us today and I have to tell you. Look, this is a very important issue here when talking about wrongful conviction in the United States. We have a lot, mostly on the right, people tell us that, yeah. We have a lot of people in prison because there’s a lot of people committing crimes. That’s not always the case, is it?
Mark Godsey:
No. I mean, I think that universally, everyone thought that 30 years ago. But both the right and the left now, particularly before Trump came into office were pretty much in agreement that the criminal justice system needs to be reformed two ways. One is the problem of mass incarceration, which even right wing Republicans who were worried about the finances and the costs of incarceration, that started getting their attention. So they started falling in line with that and the second major thing is wrongful conviction. We have far too many people who are innocent being sent to prison, being sent to death row. So in both respects, we’ve come to this sort of crossroads in the past 10 years where everyone’s sort of realizing we’ve been doing things the same way for 200 years and we’re not starting to see some real problems. Trump in sessions has set that back a little bit. But prior to that, I think there was [inaudible 00:01:53] criminal justice reform. Right up there is the need to reform the criminal justice system and make it more accurate.
Farron Cousins:
Well, about a decade ago, we were looking at anywhere between about 12 and 24 people every year in the United States finally being exonerated after spending time in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. But recently, last two, three, four years, we’re literally starting to see hundreds every year. Convictions overturned.
Mark Godsey:
[crosstalk 00:02:24] Yeah, it goes up every single year with no signs of [inaudible 00:02:29] off at all and the crazy thing is is that the people who are lucky enough to be exonerated, we know that’s just the tip of the iceberg because the vast majority of people in prison who claim innocence aren’t lucky enough to have DNA in their case or the police have thrown it away in the 20 years they’ve been in prison. The witnesses are dead and so it’s a small percentage where all the pieces and all the stars have to be in align where you can go back and reinvestigate the case to prove them innocent. So we’ve proved thousands innocent in the past couple of decades through the Innocence Movement. We know that’s literally just the tip of the iceberg, which is really heartbreaking if you think about it.
Farron Cousins:
Well, what’s really interesting about this, I guess you’d call it a phenomenon of people being wrongly convicted is how far we’ve come with scientific advancements, DNA evidence, all kinds of new forensic sciences out there. You would think and I know a lot of people assume that because of this, it would be nearly impossible to convict somebody for a crime that they didn’t commit because they watch these television shows where they go in there, they run the DNA and the results are back in five minutes and they’ve got a facial recognition. But the real criminal justice system is nothing like that whatsoever. But people have this warped view of it because science has advanced, but certainly not to the level that we see on television. [crosstalk 00:03:54]
Mark Godsey:
What’s ironic is you got these shows out there, like CSI, that are painting this picture that the state of forensics in this country is like putting man on the moon, like it’s some miracle. But actually wrongful convictions are caused by bad forensics. I mean, nothing could be further from the truth. There couldn’t be more of a Hollywood myth than the state of the forensics in this country. I mean, we’ve got all kinds of junk sciences that are carry overs from previous decades or previous centuries, even, that have never been validated to the scientific method, that are very unreliable and that’s actually one of the main things in my book, Blind Injustice. I spent several chapters talking about the state of forensics and it’s not just me saying it.
I mean, in 2009, the National Academy of Sciences, which is an independent agency that advises Congress on scientific issues, established by President Lincoln, came out with this scathing report saying that, “Look, we’re convicting all these innocent people. These forensics are a big problem. They need to be validated. We need to re-look at them again. The conclusions these scientists are sending to a court are overblown,” and really, nothing’s been done. At the end of the Obama administration, we started seeing some advances. They set up a commission, a federal commission to study this and try to approve forensics. But Trump in sessions came in and killed it. So it’s really shocking. It’s one of those situations where what the public believe and what the truth is are a complete disconnect and we’re still using these outdated, unreliable junk sciences from the 1930s in many cases. It’s just shocking.
Farron Cousins:
Well, and what people need to understand too, not that I want everybody walking around paranoid they’re gonna be convicted for something. But if you go over to a friend’s house, you get a drink, you have fingerprints on a cup. You touch their doorknob. You touch a door, anything in the bathroom. Your fingerprints are there. Your footprints are there. So as you pointed out, forensic science is not always accurate because everywhere you go, everywhere everyone goes, you’re leaving some kind of thing behind. Maybe it’s a stray hair. Maybe it’s a footprint or a fingerprint. So we do have to have our law enforcement officials do their due diligence on this and make sure that, “Okay. Well, this person had a gathering and we’ve got 25 people’s fingerprints here. Not everybody here is a suspect.” So that’s one aspect of it.
Mark Godsey:
Yeah, but let me just tell you something else that I think you might find interesting. I mean, we give even fingerprints this sort of stamp of approval as if it’s reliable. But confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon I talk about quite a bit in the book and it really plays a huge part in forensics. This psychologist out of London, [inaudible 00:06:29] George, did this study where he took leading fingerprint experts across the country and he said, “Look. I want you to look at this case where years ago, a fingerprint expert testified that the defendant’s fingerprint matched the fingerprints at the crime scene, caused him to get convicted and we now know the guy is innocent. He wasn’t even at the crime scene. We know the fingerprint expert made a mistake. Can you look at the fingerprint and tell us where he messed up?” Unbeknownst to each of these experts, what George did is he went into their own files and pulled fingerprints that each expert had testified too was a match years before. Of course, they don’t remember that this is a pair of fingerprints they’ve looked at.
All they do is look at fingerprints all day long. But they didn’t realize it was from their own case and by setting it you differently and saying, “Look, this is a case there the fingerprint expert made a mistake,” and then having them evaluate it, he got 80% of the fingerprint experts to flip their answers and say, “This is not a match. This is not the same guy. This doesn’t match the fingerprint from the crime scene,” and it’s like, “Surprise. This is from one of your cases. You testified 10 years ago and caused this guy to get convicted. So it just goes to show, and this has been proved over and over again, that confirmation bias, if you set up the context before and the police and prosecutors tell the fingerprint expert or the CSI expert, “Look, this guy’s guilty. We know the fingerprints are gonna match or we know the bite mark’s gonna match or we know the bullet’s gonna come from his gun,” it actually affects their mind.
It affects what they see and it affects the outcome and so one of the things we’ve got to do is we gotta do a blinding process where those experts aren’t told in advance what the right answer is, which is just basic [inaudible 00:07:57] scientific method. So there’s a lot of simple reforms we can do to make this more accurate, which we’re not doing.
Farron Cousins:
Absolutely and, look, we need to take a quick break here. When we come back, we’ve talked about the science. We need to get into the other side a little bit too. We need to talk about the role that prosecutors are playing in some of these wrongful convictions. So stay with me for just a moment. We’re gonna take a quick break. I’m Farron Cousins and for CMC, we’ll be right back with more Ring of Fire Radio.
