Justice for all: Registry of exonerated helps wrongly accused

GLADDENFORPL.jpgDavid Gladden was convicted of murder in Dauphin County in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2007 after articles written by the late Patriot-News reporter Pete Shellem questioned evidence against him.


This principle, traced back to the Old Testament, is deeply embedded in the criminal justice system of the United States. It is reflected in familiar rules pertinent to trial by jury, reasonable doubt, right to counsel and redress through appeal. If American justice seems sometimes to bend over backward for the criminal defense, it is because, in actuality, it does.

The system is well-intended but far from perfect. Not always do the innocent walk free. Sometimes mistakes are made. Sometimes people are wrongfully convicted. Justice, which we hold so dear, is denied.

This week, the law schools of the University of Michigan and Northwestern University released a study that should go a long way toward restoring justice denied and preventing future miscarriages. This National Registry of Exoneration examined more than 2,000 cases since 1989 in which defendants were wrongly convicted of crimes and subsequently exonerated.

The registry does not point fingers or rehash the record. What it does is provide us with a historical template through which patterns of conviction and exoneration might be examined in hopes of correcting weaknesses in the system.

Two things emphasize the importance of embracing this task.

First, forensic science is rapidly developing to the point that evidence unattainable until recently can be brought to court. DNA, for instance, is the modern-day fingerprint: overwhelming evidence of identification. Of the 2,000 names on the registry, 289 were freed on DNA evidence alone. As emerging technology enlightens hidden facts, the need to act on these findings grows more urgent.

The registry will help answer questions of how a criminal defendant can be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt on evidence that was wrong. Of particular concern is the alarming number of exonerations of people who confessed to crimes they did not commit.

Second, this registry will provide a conscience to a system that sometimes appears to be lacking one. It is a reality of modern politics that success is measured in terms of toughness: the number of hoodlums rounded up, the rate of conviction, the population of our prisons. What candidate runs on a platform of letting a criminal suspect walk free?

Official misconduct is by far the exception to the rule, but in an environment driven by local politics, there is always pressure to bend the rules and deliver the goods.

It would be all too easy to regard the registry and its message as an historical jumble of numbers and data to be sifted in scholarly debate, committed to the law journals and then shelved and forgotten. Certainly, the overwhelming majority of the men and women in prison are there for a reason: They committed a crime and must pay.

In fact, it is the overwhelming minority — those who were failed by a system that was supposed to be the guarantor of their rights and their freedom — who must be heard. Is there an acceptable margin of error in the administration of justice? Maybe we should ask Steven Crawford, David Gladden and Barry Laughman, three midstate residents convicted in separate murder cases and sentenced to long prison sentences. It took years for them to be exonerated, but it happened thanks to the hard work of the late Patriot-News reporter Pete Shellem.

How many people remain behind bars as a result of erroneous conviction? How many are on death row?

The technology of forensics will continue to advance, improving our ability to bring the guilty to account and set free the innocent. Amid this progress, the Registry of Exonerations will serve as a continuing reference to assure accuracy and fairness in our criminal justice system.

To paraphrase Blackstone, it is equally unacceptable that one person be wronged as many.

That is the contribution of the 2,000 names on the registry.