DNA tests rescue 200 wrongly convicted

A watershed moment in American justice is expected to arrive without fanfare this week when the Innocence Project hits its 200th exoneration nationwide.

That means the 200th innocent person is expected to be released from prison because re-examination of DNA taken from the original crime proved that he was wrongly convicted, according to attorney Barry Scheck, co-founder of the project

"It is a learning moment. We have a technology (DNA) that is a truth machine that allows us to go back and get justice for the innocent," Scheck said. "For the victims, it means another chance to find out who really committed the crime."

Since the first post-conviction DNA exoneration took place in 1989, inmates have been proven innocent in 31 states, including four men in New Jersey.

The tally of those freed currently stands at 198, and includes 14 men who were at one time on death row, according to Innocence Project statistics. In 43 cases, the real assailant eventually was found.

Nearly 60 percent of those exonerated have been African American. One of them is former soldier Larry Peterson of Pemberton.

In 1989, Peterson was convicted of the rape and murder of Jacqueline Harrison, a 25-year-old mother of two whose body was found two years earlier, dumped in a soybean field in Pemberton in Burlington County. She had been raped, tortured and strangled.

Forensic science was still in its infancy then. Hair, skin and body fluids were taken from the crime but DNA testing was unavailable. Microscopic study of the hairs did appear to link Peterson to the crime scene. Informants also testified that he confessed to the crime.

Peterson, then 37, was sentenced to life in prison. In the early 1990s, while working at the law library at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, he petitioned the court for access to the DNA samples from the crime. It took another decade and the legal muscle of the Innocence Project, however, before he won the motion.

Testing was finally done in 2005. It showed conclusively that the sperm, hair and skin found at the crime scene were not Peterson's. At least one of the witnesses recanted. All charges were dropped against him last May.

In July 2006, Peterson testified before the state Death Penalty Study Commission. He admitted he gets bitter about the 18 years he wrongfully spent behind bars, but was grateful he lived to see the mistake corrected.

"DNA evidence allowed me to finally walk out of prison a free man," he told the commission, which in January recommended New Jersey eliminate the death penalty. "As long as the death penalty exists in New Jersey, the next innocent person may not."

The Innocence Project is not the only organization advocating on behalf of prisoners wrongfully convicted, but it is the first dedicated to using DNA to prove the claims, Scheck said.

Started in 1992 as a law clinic by Scheck and another civil rights attorney teaching at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Innocence Project now handles about 160 cases per year and has spawned several other local innocence organizations.

Among the people they have freed are Jerry Frank Townsend, who served more than 21 years in a Florida prison for six murders and a rape.

Mentally retarded with an estimated mental capacity of an 8-year-old, Townsend confessed to anything the investigators asked. He eventually was sentenced to seven concurrent life sentences and had been in prison nearly 20 years when the mother of one of the victims convinced police to review the case.

DNA testing not only cleared Townsend, but implicated another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, who was already in prison on other rape and murder charges.

The DNA tests also exonerated another Florida inmate, Frank Lee Smith, who was on death row for the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl. The tests implicated Mosley in that crime, too.

Smith served 14 years on Florida's death row. He died of cancer in 2000 before he was officially exonerated of the murder.

Scheck stressed the limitations of DNA, however. Biological forensics are present in only about 10 percent of criminal cases, he noted, and in at least 50 percent of cases, the evidence has been lost or destroyed. Other states, particularly New Jersey, have such massive backlogs on current DNA cases that old convictions are at the back of the pack.

"The single greatest cause of false convictions is mistaken eyewitness identification, not bad science," Scheck said. "There is a huge need for reform and the real significance of the 200 cases is that we are convincing states that it is the right thing to do."

A majority of states, including New Jersey, now have laws permitting post-conviction DNA testing. States are standardizing evidence-gathering procedures, requiring video-taping of interrogations and providing compensation to exonerated inmates.

Scheck's hope is that the DNA exoneration movement will feed justice reform on a major scale. Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) agrees.

"We've seen enough innocent people convicted that there is no longer any reason to take a chance on the death penalty," said Lesniak, who has been pushing a bill to abolish the death penalty in New Jersey for the past three years. "We can't afford to be wrong."