We’ve all read stories about people who were freed from prison after DNA evidence exonorated them.
Jeffrey Deskovic is one of those cases. Convicted as a teenager for a murder he did not commit, even when evidence in the case should have tossed it out, Deskovic was released only after the Innocence Project took up his case. In being released from prison, the normal narrative (from the standpoint of the victim) goes something like this: “I’m not angry at all…I just knew that my faith in God would bring me through. I’m just going to get through the rest of my life without bitterness, because I feel like I’ve been given a second chance.”
Deskovic, refreshingly, broke out of that narrative:
Deskovic then walked outside and spoke to the media for nearly two hours, seemingly offering all the things he wanted to say when reporters were ignoring his pleas from prison.
“I’m not standing here before you because the system worked. I’m standing here in front of you despite the system,” he said.
He expressed resentment at police who forced him to falsely confess, a prosecutor who did not drop the case when DNA results suggested he should, jurors who ignored the forensic evidence and the judge who could have set aside the verdict but didn’t. And he remained frustrated by the years of failure at the appellate level that ended only after the Innocence Project took on his case.
“I hit a wall and became very depressed,” he said.
He was asked if he was angry.
“The people I considered to be friends all left me. Prison is isolating. My family has become strangers to me,” he said, adding that he lost the chance to marry a woman he loved. “I don’t need to answer. Just answer yourself. Would any of you be angry?”
To say “this isn’t right” does not begin to communicate the degree to which Deskovic had been wronged. And I don’t see a way to make him whole here. Given the role of the state in wrongfully prosecuting individuals like Deskovic I wonder if it’d be possible to get a line item in the national budget to go to the Innocence Project. This organization shouldn’t have to get donations in order to fix problems created by the state.
Deskovic’s story reminds me of Anton Chekhov’s classic short story, The Bet (or The Wager). Both Deskovic and the young lawyer in Chekhov’s story were imprisoned for 15 years even though they committed no crime. Chekhov’s lawyer, though he grew incredibly knowledgeable after having read hundreds of books in solitude, grew to despise all of civilization at the end of his 15 years. Deskovic probably harbors a lot of anger. I do hope he will not be punished twice over by being unable to keep his anger from dominating him from this point forward.
As for obtaining government funding for organizations such as the Innocence Project: I wonder whether doing so would force the government to first admit that its justice system should work better at its current funding level or that its justice system is underfunded, and because it is underfunded, it cannot do its job well without organizations such as the Innocence Project. I’d expect the federal government to make the argument that the most economical and just system we could afford would still make wrongful convictions. I’d expect them to tell us that while they are sorry that these things happen, they are inevitable in limited resource environments. Organizations like the Innocence Project serve customers (donors) who want our justice system to be even better than the one our politicians, and perhaps most of our fellow citizens, are willing to pay for. It does exactly what a non-profit should; it enables someone to buy a better society based on his or her rare tastes.
The question this kind of case always raises in my mind: what’s the rate of false convictions for serious crimes like this? It seems like we have enough information to answer this now, in principle. Take the full set of, say, murder convictions in a span of time before DNA evidence was normally used in the trial. Randomly select murder convictions in the set, and for each one, determine whether there’s DNA evidence that could falsify the prosecution’s story. When we have enough falsifiable convictions, run the DNA tests on all of them, even the ones where the convict was already executed or released on appeal or whatever. Then we might get a meaningful fraction.
Anecdotes like this one are terrible, but to know how big a problem it is, we need to know how common it is. Enough death penalty cases have been overturned on DNA evidence that we know there are a lot of errors. But what fraction? If it’s 1%, that’s a very different sort of problem than if it’s, say, 30%.
Non-profits fill gaps that the economic/political market can’t or won’t fill. In the best case, the gap it fills should end up necessitating that the government steps in to fill it, hence making the non-profit irrelevant.
I think we’ll soon have a much better handle on false convictions, as DNA is used more and the funds become available to better store the DNA of perps. I wouldn’t say 30%, but I’m betting it is a lot bigger than 1%.