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<DIV>As someone who has represented people on death row that I believe were/are
innocent, one of whom was executed anyway, this book, let alone the
book review posted by Ted, should be mandatory reading for all citizens, so
I am deleting Ted's message and leaving only the book review for those of you
who didn't get to that part of his message. Bruce Livingston<FONT
face=arial,helvetica><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
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<DIV><FONT face=arial,helvetica><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2
FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10"><B>The National Center for Reason and Justice
<BR></B>[Copyright 2000 Mark Pendergrast. First printed in the <I>Atlanta
Journal-Constitution</I> and the <I>Philadelphia Inquirer</I>, 27 February 2000.
Posted here with explicit permission from Mark Pendergrast. </FONT><FONT lang=0
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" face=Arial color=#000000 size=5
FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="16" BACK="#ffffff"><BR></FONT><FONT lang=0
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" face=Arial color=#000000 size=2
FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10" BACK="#ffffff"><B>Book Review <BR></B><BR></DIV>
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<DIV><I>Actual Innocence: Five Days To Execution, <BR>And Other Dispatches
From The Wrongly Convicted. </I></DIV>
<DIV>by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, & Jim Dwyer. <BR>Doubleday, 2000.
$24.95. 298 pages. ISBN 0-385-49341-X. <BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P align=left>Reviewed by Mark Pendergrast <BR>
<P align=left>Chilling. Disturbing. Terrifying. Appalling. These words
describe not only the gruesome rapes and murders detailed in this book, but
the fate of the innocent men who were accused of these crimes, convicted, and
ultimately cleared by DNA evidence. What emerges from these pages is a
chilling, disturbing, terrifying, and appalling portrait of the much-touted
United States legal system. While the accused are supposed to be presumed
innocent until proven guilty, it appears that the convicted are presumed to be
guilty even when proven innocent. In case after case, prosecutors and judges
have attempted to keep innocent men locked behind bars, citing the need for
"finality," a word that is all too real for those on death row. <BR><BR>Why?
Although it defies common sense, the law of the land was stated by Chief
Justice William Rehnquist in 1993: "A claim of actual innocence is not itself
a constitutional claim." Thus, the title of the book, <I>Actual Innocence</I>,
is ironic. It is a technical legal term used dismissively by many judges. In a
recently aired <I>Frontline</I> documentary, <I>The Case for Innocence</I> --
which featured lawyers and authors Scheck and Neufeld -- filmmaker Ofra Bikel
asked Texas Judge Sharon Keller whether a man cleared by DNA tests might be
innocent. "If you're talking about the point of view of <I>actual</I>
innocence?" Keller asked, clearly startled by the notion. "Oh! Um, I suppose
that is a possibility." But that wasn't the point for her. Whether the convict
was actually innocent was irrelevant. <BR><BR>Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, offer compelling case
histories of men such as Walter Snyder, convicted of raping Faye Treatser in
Virginia. They document how, once police zero in on a suspect, everyone
recasts the evidence and their memories to make him match. Eyewitness
testimony is notoriously fallible, particularly if, as in Snyder's case, his
picture is first shown to the victim, then she sees only him sitting on a
bench at the police station. Eventually, though Treatser first passed over his
picture, she proclaimed herself "100 percent sure" he was her rapist.
<BR><BR>Snyder was convicted in 1986 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Like
many innocent men, he refused to take the course for sexual offenders and was
consequently denied parole. (Ironically, real sex offenders who play the game
are paroled earlier.) Eventually, despite a string of incompetent or greedy
lawyers, Snyder got a new DNA test which proved the rape sperm was not his.
But in Virginia, as in many other states, a convict has only 21 days after his
conviction to prove his innocence. This had taken seven years. The only option
was to ask Governor L. Douglas Wilder for a pardon. Despite the support of the
state's Attorney General Randy Sengel (unusual, since many prosecutors resist
DNA evidence), Wilder waffled until sympathetic news stories on Snyder's case
forced Wilder to grant a pardon. <BR><BR><I>Actual Innocence </I>is not an
easy read emotionally, but it is very clearly written, with a strong narrative
thrust and interesting historical anecdotes that will appeal to lay as well as
legal readers. It is gratifying that 64 convicted men have been cleared by DNA
evidence. But that isn't the point. "What matters most is not how these people
got out of jail but how they got into it," the authors observe. In a succinct
summary, they tick off the contributing factors: "Sometimes eyewitnesses make
mistakes. Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated. Racism
trumps the truth. Lab tests are rigged. Defense lawyers sleep. Prosecutors
lie."<BR><BR>Each of these short sentences summarizes a disturbing chapter in
the book. Jailhouse "snitches" frequently fabricate hearsay confessions in
order to shorten their own sentences. Police routinely lie and use mind-games
to extract so-called "confessions" from innocent people. If you are a black
man accused of raping a white woman, you are in deep, deep trouble not only
from overt racism but because "they all look the same" to many white
witnesses. Before the iron-clad DNA tests arrived, junk science ruled the
courts, with ambiguous blood evidence and bogus hair identification, and such
evidence is still used. Underpaid public defenders may be overworked
idealists, but they can also be incompetent and/or uncaring. <BR><BR>Most
disturbing is the callous and sometimes vicious attitude of prosecutors. Take
the case of Robert Miller, convicted in 1987 of the rape/murders of two
elderly women in Oklahoma City. Miller was sentenced to two death penalities
plus 725 years. After Miller's incarceration, the same pattern of rapes of
elderly women continued, with the same modus operandi, and the guilty man,
Ronald Lott, was captured. Even though prosecutor Ray Elliott knew about Lott,
he kept it to himself. The jurors never heard that Lott had admitted to
identical crimes in the same neighborhood. And even when DNA evidence cleared
Miller and implicated Lott in the murders, Elliott insisted that Miller must
have been present. "We're going to give Robert Miller the needle," Elliott
gloated. "He's just blowfish." The prosecutor summoned Lott and offered him a
deal if he would implicate Miller, but Lott refused. Today, Ray Elliott is an
Oklahoma judge. <BR><BR>This book documents several cases like this, in which
prosecutors, cops, pathologists,and others either lief or distorted evidence.
But why would they do that? Generally, it is because they were truly convinced
that this man was guilty, and so a little tweaking of the evidence was
justified. Once invested in this belief system, it became very difficult for
them to reverse themselves and admit they had incarcerated an innocent man. So
they denied it and fought the DNA evidence. <BR><BR>What is to be done about
the situation? The authors make specific, workable, common-sense suggestions
throughout the book, summarizing them in an appendix. The most obvious
recommendation is to use DNA testing wherever possible, within weeks of a
crime. And test old evidence. "Hundreds of thousands of rape kits from
unsolved cases are thrown out or sit in dead storage for years with no effort
made by the authorities to run DNA tests," they write, "squandering
opportunities to identify serial offenders and clear the wrongly convicted."
Other recommendations include videotaping all police interrogations, limiting
the use of snitches, making crime labs independent of police and prosecutors,
disallowing junk science, paying court-appointed defenders more, compensating
the wrongly convicted, and putting a moratorium on the death penalty.
<BR><BR>But until police, prosecutors, and judges are held legally accountable
for their actions, their near-absolute power will continue to corrupt
absolutely. They are generally immune from prosecution themselves, and until
that changes, these travesties of justice are likely to continue, in one form
or another. "Under the current setup," write the authors, "a prosecutor can't
be sued for knowingly allowing perjured testimony or for deliberately covering
up evidence of innocence." <BR><BR>Scheck and Neufeld run the Innocence
Project, specializing in cases where DNA can clear the wrongly convicted. But
what about innocent people who cannot rely on DNA evidence? After a
conviction, it is very difficult to win an appeal without compelling new
evidence. <I>Actual Innocence</I> should be required reading for everyone
involved in our justice system, but it raises many more questions than it
answers. <BR><BR>—Mark Pendergrast is the author of <I>Victims of Memory</I>
and, most recently, <I>Uncommon
Grounds</I>.<BR></P></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></BODY></HTML>