09/24/08 – Jason Kreag – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest today is Jason Craig.
He is a staff attorney at the Innocence Project, formerly with the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
Thank you.
That's good to have you here.
And I've got to tell you, I've always been interested in this Innocence Project thing.
And all these years I've spent interviewing people on the radio.
I've never gotten around to talking to any of you guys before.
But you're in the news recently.
I know the big story, I guess, in true crime this week is the death penalty case that got put off in Georgia.
And we can talk about that.
But I saw you guys in the news for getting another Dallas resident freed from prison after what I think was, what, decades for a crime that he did not commit.
And I was wondering if we could start the show by you telling us about that story as much as you can.
Sure.
Last Friday, Johnny Lindsay, I think, became the 19th person exonerated in Dallas through DNA evidence.
And Mr. Lindsay is represented by local attorneys, the local Innocence Project in Dallas.
And Michelle Moore was his attorney.
But his case is representative of many that have happened in Dallas and across the country.
He spent 26 years in prison for a crime, sexual assault, that happened in 1981 that he did not commit and has conclusively been proven that he did not commit it through DNA evidence.
And the reason, I guess, if you have to give one reason why Mr. Lindsay had to spend that time there is it was a faulty eyewitness identification that caused his conviction at the time.
And we only now can prove that because we have DNA.
We can go back and test the evidence and show that it wasn't Mr. Lindsay.
So what happened in his case, there was a photo lineup.
This is literally just photos that are shown to a victim.
And in his case, about a year after the crime took place, the victim had moved away.
The local police in Dallas sent her the copies of the photo lineup.
And she picked out Mr. Lindsay.
And this is just a remarkably uncommon way to do a lineup and certainly doesn't follow any of the practices that we now know can help make identifications reliable.
But she picked out Mr. Lindsay.
He had what I think most people would think would be a pretty good alibi.
He was at work and he had time cards showing that he was at work and his boss explaining that he was at work.
But, unfortunately, the jury didn't believe him.
And what we now know is that we don't have to rely on those time cards or the identification.
We could just point to the DNA and say he was conclusively not the person.
And he spent 26 years in prison for a crime that he didn't commit.
Now, this man is a poor black guy, right?
Johnny Lindsay.
I'm curious as to whether he had a jury of his peers.
Well, you know, I don't know the composition of the jury in 1981, but I suspect that your concerns were evident.
But I don't know what the racial composition or the economic composition of the jury was at the time.
You know, I don't know if it was the Chappelle Show.
I think it was the Chappelle Show, a rerun that I saw recently, really kind of drove this home where it was a rich white guy accused.
And he looks over at the jury and it's a bunch of hard-ass brothers and very much not a group of his peers sitting in judgment of him.
Roles reversed.
And that really drives the point home, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I think what happens, though, in these cases, obviously, a very tragic crime happened.
And probably regardless of who was sitting in the jury box, you know, you obviously feel for the victim.
She went through a terrible crime.
And I'm sure she believed that she was picking out the right person at the time.
You know, we just now know that she wasn't.
And I don't think that, you know, in all of our – well, in all of our cases that I know of where we have this issue come up, the victim truly believes they're thinking they have the right person.
And it's not surprising that the jury belief, you know, believed the victim.
All of that makes sense.
What we can focus on is that there are ways to minimize kind of an inaccurate identification.
And one way that would have been very easy in Mr. Lindsey's case is not to do a photo lineup that was sent through the mail for the victim to look at, you know, by herself.
Well, what about the defense?
And did they cross-examine the police and ask them in front of the jury about how this lineup was conducted?
I'm sure it was done in this case.
And I'm sure that the victim's identification won out when she got in the courtroom and said, you know, that's him sitting right there.
You know, that's very, very powerful.
It's evidence that minimizes, you know, many other things that come in during a trial.
Now, that's kind of a regular thing, isn't it, that people recognize the perpetrator from the photo.
By the time they get in the courtroom, they're not really remembering the original crime.
They're remembering the guy from the picture.
Certainly one possibility, and it certainly comes up, you know, we've been able to identify, though, in almost three-quarter of our cases of the DNA exonerations across the country, there's been an issue with an eyewitness misidentification.
So clearly we all, each of us, do not have as good a memory as we think.
And probably our memories, when you've just gone through a very traumatic experience, there's other things working against our memory.
You know, aside from a police officer who's deliberately trying to suggest someone, even if you take that deliberate kind of cheating out of the system, there's a whole host of things that cause us to not be as accurate when we think we're identifying someone.
But by the time you get to the trial and you point across the courtroom and say that's the person, you know, who committed this horrible crime, that's very, very powerful evidence.
And no one would doubt that, you know, the victims in these cases believe that they're pointing to the right person.
And juries believe that, too.
And now, fortunately, we can look at some of these cases and, with DNA evidence, you know, demonstrate conclusively, absolutely, 100%, that it wasn't, you know, the right person.
And in about 40% of the cases, we can go on and identify who the actual perpetrator was.
Now, you know, this is something interesting that I notice I watch, you know, not too often, but sometimes I'll watch, you know, Bill Curtis investigative reports and those kinds of true crime stories and American justice, that kind of thing.
And a lot of those things are about false convictions and people who eventually are released.
And I've noticed that in some of these cases, the evidence of innocence is so overwhelming, where you're just sitting in your own living room throwing up your hands and saying, my God, I can't believe they got a conviction on this poor guy, and thank goodness he's finally got some justice.
But inevitably, there's an interview with the victim's family.
Or, in fact, I just saw this yesterday in the case of the guy in Atlanta, where it was an off-duty cop that got killed, and so they had an interview with his buddy.
And it seems like the closer to the victims the people are, the less willing they are to even consider for a moment that the original arrestee is possibly the wrong guy.
And it doesn't matter how overwhelming the case is, it's too personally unsettling for them to think that the real guy got away, or especially that they helped put away an innocent man, and in effect helped the real killer get away, that they just refuse to consider.
And they would rather just see an innocent man sit in prison than admit to themselves that they've been wrong.
I think you're hitting on part of the work that's very, very important.
And I don't think that any of us can underestimate the initial trauma that a victim goes through, and then having to relive it again when it comes back 26 years afterwards, or 23 years afterwards in Thomas McGowan's another Dallas case, to have to relive it again.
And I can understand that there's some of that reluctance, but that's certainly not representative of all the cases.
There's another case in Texas right now where, unfortunately, the person who was convicted died in prison.
His name's Tim, I think it's Timothy Cole or Tim Cole.
And the victim in that case knows of the evidence, knows it's not him, and it has been remarkable in reaching out to Mr. Cole's family and trying to clear his name, basically working with his defense attorneys trying to clear his name.
And there are numerous examples of that where the victim is able to work through what clearly is a retraumatization of very difficult times and accept the new facts and try to move on.
Certainly that doesn't happen in every case, but I don't think we can't fault them, because in every instance, regardless, they and their family have gone through a very troubling event at a minimum.
So I think what's more disturbing to me is when a prosecutor or a police officer who investigated the case kind of stonewalls and, in light of DNA evidence that's conclusive, just refuses to believe it.
That's much more troubling to me than when a victim or a victim's family member, who's working through very difficult things, than when they have trouble believing the scientific evidence.
Right, and it seems like that happens a lot, too.
That's a pretty regular thing where the prosecutors refuse to budge.
I remember in this recent Dallas case, the judge specifically praised this prosecutor for his willingness to not stonewall.
That was the exception that proved the rule.
Yeah, and we see that now.
Sorry, Dallas is somewhat unique across the country right now because they have a prosecutor's office, a district attorney's office, who's willing to be open-minded and look at these old convictions and really seek the truth.
Fortunately, one of the other reasons why Dallas is unique is even before the current prosecutor, really basically back until the early 80s, they've had a great system of collecting and preserving evidence, which we don't see across the country, and it's not always that way.
So in Dallas we kind of have a prosecutor's office who's open, and we have the ability to test evidence because it was saved and preserved.
If you don't have both those things, it can be very, very difficult to prove your innocence, even if the crime is just based on biological evidence.
And now that's a very important point about proving innocence because once you've been convicted, the burden of proof is on you, not beyond a reasonable doubt, but at least almost, I guess, correct me where I'm wrong here, I'm not a lawyer, but something along the lines of the kind of preponderance of evidence that you would need in a civil case or something in order to win your appeal.
Well, it's more than a civil case, but certainly the burden does shift.
The presumption of innocence ends when you're convicted, and that presumption is gone forever.
And in order to vacate your conviction to prove your innocence, the statutes vary from state to state, but in general it's definitely a tougher burden than pre-trial when you already have the presumption of innocence.
And now, you know, this is an anecdote, and I can't prove that what she says is right or anything like that, but I believed her at the time and it made perfect sense.
She was an assistant district attorney from Harris County, Houston, Texas, and of course she was completely innocent of this, and I guess I was probably pretty hard on her asking all the questions I was asking.
Of course she never did this, but the way that she perceived the rest of the district attorney's office operating in Houston is take whoever the cops brought in and prosecute them to the nth degree, and if they're really innocent, they'll get out on appeal.
And the prosecutors, that's simply their modus operandi.
They really don't care one way or another whether these people are guilty or innocent.
They just need to get their conviction rating up, etc.
I mean, look, there's a couple things here.
Certainly that's not what prosecutors' associations, either state or national associations, that's not what they will say.
And if you read any of their literature, they would say, you know, we're here to do justice and we have as much of an interest in not convicting innocent people as we have in convicting guilty people.
And that's, of course, the goal that they should have.
And I think that this anecdote, of course, there are individual assistant district attorneys who get overcome by the competitive nature of it, want to get a promotion, whatever it may be.
But there are people just like everyone else, and they may just be overly aggressive.
And that obviously contributes to wrongful convictions.
A prosecutor who's essentially trying to game the system or cheat a little bit to get an unfair advantage, to get a conviction.
And we see this in some of our cases.
Sometimes it's overt, whereas exculpatory evidence was excluded from the defense at trial.
And, you know, the prosecutor has a clear duty to disclose to a defendant pre-trial or at trial any evidence that's favorable to the defendant and in the possession of the prosecutor or the state.
That includes the police officers and other investigative agencies.
Sometimes we see prosecutors just don't follow the law.
And they can benefit from that, obviously, by getting an easier conviction.
And in our cases, we see that happen.
There's another recent Dallas exoneration, Stephen Phillips, and his case has currently been exonerated by a trial court in Dallas.
And a court of criminal appeals is going to make the official order vacating all of his sentences.
But in that case, there was some exculpatory evidence that just wasn't turned over.
Maybe if it was, Mr. Phillips wouldn't have spent 25 years in prison.
Well, you know, I think, you know, for argument's sake, when we're talking in abstractions like this, obviously, you know, every judge is a different individual and so forth.
Every prosecutor is different.
But it seems like, okay, so for argument's sake, we have to give them the benefit of the doubt that these are professional people, that they're doing as good a job as they can of, you know, doing the prosecuting and trying to get it right.
It seems like there must be something wrong with the incentive structure, that it's built in terms of their incentive to get it right in the first place and then accountability for when they get it wrong.
I mean, you can have in some places, like in Dallas County, where you have a sheetrock scandal, where people are just going to prison by the score for possessing sheetrock that the police called cocaine, that kind of thing.
No cop, no DA, no anybody ever went to jail for what they did to all those innocent people.
Yeah, I think that, you know, going to jail, you know, criminal liability is probably not going to happen.
But there may be other reforms that can change things, and it may just be something as simple as a district attorney, you know, or assistant district attorney who's found to have withheld Brady evidence, for example, which is the favorable evidence that a defendant should get.
You know, maybe he or she, you know, has a mandatory, you know, three-month-long probationary period where a supervisor then is going to have to do every case with him or something like that, and it doesn't have to be, you know, take their bar license away immediately and don't let them have a job.
There are very simple solutions that I think could curb some of this, and I think there are some jurisdictions and some district attorneys who are open to that and willing to do that, but that definitely would be a change from kind of how things are run now on average.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I was just thinking that I guess because of their monopoly, that if you add accountability for when they get it wrong, ultimately the result of that is going to be they're going to make it more difficult to prove that they were wrong.
Well, maybe that's the case.
I don't know, and I think that, you know, the kind of increasing rate of these DNA exonerations, which are just crystal clear when you have them because the evidence, you know, can't be questioned.
You identify the actual perpetrator.
You exclude the person who was convicted and did many years in prison.
You know, at some point, even the most kind of stonewalled prosecutor has to look at the numbers and, you know, be moved by them and at least be willing and open to admit that, well, there can be mistakes and there are mistakes in cases, and there's no reason to think that my jurisdiction is the only place in the country that wouldn't have ever made a mistake.
You know, eventually, I think, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think that that would happen.
Well, and, you know, it isn't perfect by a long shot, but I think the basic premises of the American criminal justice system, well, maybe not anymore, but used to be, as far as I can tell, and certainly ought to be, you know, the standard for the world to look to and copy.
I mean, our Bill of Rights is really cool about they can't force you to testify against yourself.
You are mandated to have defense counsel to help you defend yourself.
You're mandated to be able to cross-examine all the witnesses against you and all the evidence against you and all these appeals processes, the presumption of innocence and the jury of your peers in serious cases, this kind of thing.
This ought to work pretty good, it sounds like, right?
Yeah, I mean, that's what we're showing.
You know, despite all of those protections for someone who, you know, faces criminal allegations, there are mistakes made, and some of the reasons why the mistakes made are just innocent, they're always going to happen, and sometimes it's because people are trying to kind of cheat the system a little bit.
And then sometimes it's made because, you know, some of the crimes, especially the crimes where we can deal with with biological evidence, they're, you know, vicious, traumatic crimes, and there's a lot of pressure on a prosecutor to solve them.
You know, they go unsolved for months.
You know, people are nervous, and they should be, and there's a lot of pressure on everyone, the police at that point, to solve them, and, you know, sometimes that pressure probably makes police officers or prosecutors miss certain things that they would have caught if it wasn't as high pressure of a situation.
And each of those things, I think, is a good reason to just be open, and we would argue that district attorney's officers across the country should be open and willing to consent to post-conviction DNA testing.
You know, no one wins if the wrong person is in prison.
Right, yeah, no doubt about that.
And is that mandatory in how many states?
Most states now, I think about 42 states, do have some kind of state statute providing for post-conviction DNA testing.
That is, someone who's in prison or was convicted can request DNA testing according to a state statute.
There are still a handful of states that don't have that yet.
But the way the statute is interpreted varies dramatically from state to state and local jurisdiction to local jurisdiction.
Right.
Because, you know, it makes a huge difference whether the prosecutor, the local prosecutor, is going to be willing and open to reexamining a new case or whether he or she is going to read the record and say, look, there's so much evidence of guilt here, we don't even need to do the testing.
And those are the cases where we think, you know, that's the exact opposite attitude that one should have because we've seen exonerations that, you know, the case looked like it was open and shut.
It looked like they had the right person from the beginning and there was a lot of evidence.
It turns out, you know, it's just not the right guy.
That's funny.
You know, there's this circular argument that says, well, Jason, you're just proving that the system works.
Way to go.
No, no, that's true.
That's true.
And we face that sometimes.
And, you know, there's just a huge variation in the kind of responses that we get from district attorneys.
But hopefully, you know, hopefully more places will be like Dallas, and I think that that will be the case.
And then as a result of some of these things, we'll change the way, you know, eyewitness identifications are done.
We'll change the way interrogations are done.
In a quarter of our cases, someone, the defendant, gave an incriminating statement, either a confession or some other incriminating statement, to a crime that he or she didn't commit.
And, you know, if we recorded, tape recorded or videotaped all police interrogations, maybe we would figure out, you know, why that person ended up giving an incriminating statement to a crime that he or she, you know, didn't commit.
So there are reforms that we try and argue for based on the exonerations, the DNA exonerations that we see across the country.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I remember that movie My Cousin Vinny, where Ralph Macchio says to the cop, I killed him.
I killed him.
I actually haven't seen that movie.
And then the transcript says, and then he said to me, I killed him.
I killed him.
As the cops were reading it in court.
Right, yeah.
I mean, once you're reading that cold transcript, it can come off certainly very differently than, you know, what you would see if you were able to listen to it or watch it.
Yeah.
Now, about those confessions, the false confessions, I don't want to be too specific and accidentally say coerced confessions because I know that there are people who probably really not understanding how the legal system works in terms of, well, they got me now, but the trials later and these kinds of things are put in a position where they just want to get out of this tiny room with the hot lights and these two brutes with the bad breath, and so they confess to anything.
But on the other hand, I remember learning this, I guess, back in psychology class at community college.
There are false confessions to serious crimes all the time, and even in situations where the cop could very credibly say, I swear I did not pressure the guy at all.
I didn't put words in his mouth at all.
He straight confessed.
Turns out it was someone else.
What is going on there?
It happens both ways.
It happens both ways.
Everything from the overt kind of pressure, a coerced confession, down to a police officer can, according to the U.S. Constitution, can lie to a suspect during the interrogation and say, we have your fingerprint there.
Why don't you just tell us what it is?
Even though no fingerprints were collected, that's okay.
That's not seen as a violation to the law.
Then all the way down to for whatever reason someone confesses to a crime that just voluntarily confesses to a crime that he or she didn't do.
Those are not really the cases that we deal with that often.
That just hasn't been, I guess, the spectrum of our cases that involve incriminating statements.
Usually they're statements given after hours of interrogation.
Almost always they're statements given without the help of an attorney, without being able to consult an attorney beforehand.
At times they're statements that were based on what are legal police investigative tactics like lying to a suspect about what the evidence is that they've already collected.
Nonetheless, now we can go back and see, regardless of what happened, we can go back and see, okay, well, what was the true answer?
What does DNA show us?
If we were able to videotape the statement, maybe you would see what a police officer later testified to.
Sometimes it happens where the defendant says something, and then the police officer says only the suspect could have known that.
That's a piece of information that only the perpetrator could have known, therefore it must be him.
If we could watch the videotape, I bet you we would see sometimes that maybe inadvertently, maybe intentionally, some information is leaked to the person who's being interrogated, and then he states that a bit of information is turned around and says only the perpetrator could know that.
That's another thing that would be minimized if we were just simply able to record interrogations.
Right now, I think more and more jurisdictions are doing it.
There's over 350 local jurisdictions who record interrogations for certain types of crimes.
So I think it would be great if all of them were.
Yeah, that seems like it's good for all sides, right?
If the cops are only doing their job as best they can, then no problem.
Yeah, yeah, and it doesn't have to be.
It could be pretty simple.
When you get in the room, the tape starts automatically, and you don't have to fumble around with press and record.
We can do things digitally now that we couldn't do 15 years ago or even 10 years ago that would seem to make it pretty easy.
Hey, that's how they turn on their dashboard cameras.
Here's when they turn on their lights and siren.
The dashboard camera kicks in.
It comes on automatically, yeah.
It could be the same way in an interview room.
There's no reason why that couldn't be the case.
Sometimes the tape is destroyed or happened to be off in the time that there's a fatal shooting in the back of somebody.
This is Austin, Texas, so all civilians got to walk around in bulletproof vests so the APD doesn't take our lives away from us.
You're not giving too much of a good, I guess, critique of Austin.
I'm going to have to be careful next time I'm there.
Yeah, well, you know, I really need to look into the numbers proportion-wise, but I know that I was trying to keep track as best I could and reading the local paper a lot more back in the early part of this century, and I remember, well, it still is sort of, but relatively speaking, the early part of this century, 2000, 2001, 2002, and it just seemed like nothing but shooting after shooting after shooting of unarmed black men, and it was just incredible almost.
One of them was a retarded guy who they said was the equivalent of a 3-year-old in intelligence, was running down the street in his underwear screaming because the fire engine had driven by and the siren had spooked him.
And so the cop could have just taken him down with a stiff arm or a headlock or grabbed him or whatever, and instead he shot him nine times in the chest because the guy picked up a stick that then magically turned into a branch, which magically turned into a threat to the life of this officer, which is ridiculous.
And they get away with these kinds of things.
They turn the scales around on who's killing who.
If a Texan kills a cop, he gets the death penalty.
Forget about it.
If a cop kills a Texan, he's a hero.
Maybe he gets a week off with pay, and then everything's fine.
Yeah, that's tragic, certainly.
That's definitely tragic.
Well, and it cuts right to the heart of the entire theory that we have a rule of law, which even applies to the president and the district attorney, too.
Yeah, I mean, you know, in our work we're just repeatedly advocating, though, for district attorneys being open and willing to review past cases and old cases.
And when you are, you find out just what's happening in Dallas, that there are a bunch of people who are convicted and spend time in prison for crimes that they never committed.
And Dallas, there's no reason to expect that the numbers would be any different in any other city if we had a DA who was open to reviewing them and if we had a lab or an evidence storage facility that collected and preserved evidence over the last several decades.
Well, now, that's a really important point that Dallas County, the district attorney there now, he just happens to be so willing to come forward with this evidence that that's why it seems like there's so many guilty, innocent people convicted in Dallas.
But you're saying there's really no reason to believe that Dallas is particularly worse.
It's just that they have a better district attorney telling the truth now.
I mean, I think that's okay.
Of course, we will probably never know the true answer to that because there are other factors, obviously, that could play into this.
But I certainly wouldn't think that if the evidence was available everywhere and if we had district attorneys everywhere who were willing to search for the truth and look for the evidence and consent to testing, that Dallas wouldn't be drastically different from other big cities.
I read a statistic recently that said that this country of 300 million people out of, what, 6.2 or 3 or 4 billion on Earth has 25% of the planet's prisoners.
Is that really right?
Do you know about that?
I don't know if that number is accurate, but we definitely have a disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated in some form.
It's over 2 million, right?
Sorry?
It's over 2 million people.
Yeah, and I think that number, though, includes people who are involved in, as far as probation, local jails, and prisons.
Oh, I thought it was 7 million when you take parole and probation, that it was 2 million actually in cages.
We could check this easily, I'm sure, I suppose.
Right, the magic of Google.
I bet you someone in the chat room could find the link for us.
That's probably true.
I'm sorry, I was bringing up numbers off the top of my head and not knowing what the hell I'm talking about.
By the way, you know that anecdote earlier about the Houston Assistant District Attorney?
I'm remembering now that the context of that was this was when the scandal was in all the papers about the crime lab in Houston, and how, I think they even had quotes of the so-called scientists at the crime lab saying their job was to help police get convictions, and if that meant lying about anything that was supposed to be considered science, that was no problem to them.
Unfortunately, this is not as uncommon as we would hope to be, and if you just look at the DNA exonerations across the country, if you just look at those as your universe, because they're the easiest ones for us, we know the person absolutely certainly didn't do it, 65% of the wrongful convictions involve some kind of lab error or some kind of junk science.
And again, here sometimes it's science that's literally not science, it's science that's made up, or a lab analyst who really isn't a scientist, or a lab analyst who really didn't do the testing that he said he was going to do.
And then sometimes it's just error, innocent or non-intentional error.
But 65% of the cases that we find from these wrongful convictions, there's lab error or junk science involved.
Yeah, I remember on American Justice or whatever, on A&E, or even on all the news, they always used to talk about the FBI crime lab is the gold standard of the most advanced scientists in the whole world.
And then Frederick Whitehurst came out and said the FBI crime lab is an absolute disaster.
If this is your gold standard, we are in deep, deep trouble.
Yeah, and right now, fortunately, we don't have to rely on some of the tests that, for example, the FBI used.
One of the most recent forensic techniques that has come under a huge microscope is called comparative bullet lead analysis.
And it's been used, I think, for about 30 or 40 years.
And finally, the FBI just admitted that there isn't a scientific basis for this comparison.
And it was a way to try and compare a bullet collected from a crime scene, the lead content of that bullet, to other bullets that the bullet came from, the package of bullets that the bullet from the crime scene came from.
And finally, the FBI just admitted this just isn't scientific.
There's no backing for this.
And now those cases are being reviewed, and they're open to it now, certainly, to review those convictions that were based on comparative bullet lead analysis.
And that's an area that here at the Innocence Project we've aided in that review.
But primarily, and really exclusively, we deal with cases that involve biological evidence and DNA evidence.
Wow.
Do you have any idea the numbers of people convicted with bullet lead analysis testimony included?
Unfortunately, I don't know the numbers.
And, you know, there would be two different numbers, right?
There would be a huge number where that was part of the prosecution's case, you know, one part of the evidence.
Right.
And then there would be a smaller number where that would have been the kind of linking forensic evidence, and the conviction would have been based on that and then other circumstantial evidence.
It's really those latter cases that are the ones to focus on, not the cases where there was other concrete non-circumstantial evidence and where the bullet lead analysis was just a part of the state's case.
At least if you're going to focus on any, you'd focus on the ones where it was a big part of the case first.
Right.
Wow.
Now, this Atlanta case, this guy is being sprung because the witnesses are changing their story, not because of biological evidence, right?
Right.
Troy Davis' case did not have biological evidence in it, and he's not actually being sprung.
He right now has a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court because of the witnesses who testified against him at trial.
Of the nine witnesses, seven of them now have recanted their testimony and said, you know, what I told the jury back then, what this conviction was based on just isn't accurate.
And unfortunately, Mr. Davis hasn't been able to have a full hearing to present that evidence in any court.
And right now the U.S. Supreme Court is evaluating whether or not they should stay his execution indefinitely to allow Mr. Davis to present the evidence from the seven witnesses who recanted.
And it's a very extremely troubling case.
Needless to say, there's huge amounts of evidence that contradicts information, that contradicts the evidence that was presented at trial that could establish his innocence.
And why courts have refused to allow him to present that so far is mystified to me and extremely troubling.
If we're going to use the ultimate penalty, I think we should take as much care as we could.
Well, and, you know, I guess as a younger man I used to support the death penalty because, of course, I asked the universal question, what if somebody did that to somebody you love?
You would want them to get the death penalty, open and shut, simple as that.
And yet what we're really dealing with here is the state and 12 yahoos deciding whether somebody really did something or not and whether they deserve death or not.
And are any of us really perfect enough to have taking somebody's life as a punishment when we have a government that can't deliver the mail or do any other thing right?
They certainly, as you guys are showing every day, convict innocent people, I guess.
Have you guys broken down the numbers, how many innocent people are sent to prison every day in this country?
No, I don't think anyone can answer that number.
But we have been able to show, looking back, of the roughly first 220 or so DNA exonerations, 16 of those people spent time on death row.
So those were people who the system, we all thought that we had the worst of the worst, sent them to death row.
And of the first 220 or so, 16 of those individuals turned out to be the wrong guy.
And that should give us all pause.
Now, there's a battle here.
The most famous case in Austin since the shooting from the tower is the yogurt shop murders.
And there's something new about DNA that I guess the defense is saying that they believe they can prove that DNA collected at the crime scene under, I guess, new science, is that it?
Would be able to conclusively prove that their clients were not the perpetrators of that.
Do you know about that?
I only know about that case in the most general sense.
But what I could add is that there are new methods of collecting DNA and analyzing it that allow us to get a profile off of smaller and smaller amounts of biological evidence and evidence that is decades old or may be a little degraded.
And the science certainly has allowed for that in recent years.
Just since 2004, we've developed a couple new tests.
Well, we haven't, but we've been able to benefit from a couple new types of DNA tests that allow us to get profiles from very small amounts of biology.
So I suspect that that's one of the things that's happening there.
Maybe there was testing before using a method that was available at trial or years ago that seemed inconclusive.
And there are testing methods that are available now that can provide us results that we couldn't get even just four years ago.
Well, you know, I've got to tell you, as I said at the beginning of the show, I don't know really why I haven't gotten around to interviewing any of you guys before, but I've been silently cheering you all on since, I guess, the mid-90s or so was probably around the time I first heard of this thing.
And it's such important work.
Somebody's got to do it.
I guess there weren't as many doing it before this.
And you guys put graduate students to work all across the country helping you and that kind of thing, too, right?
Yeah, we have law students here at our clinic in Manhattan, law students from Cardozo School of Law, and then there are about 40 Innocence Projects.
There's an Innocence Network now, about 40, I think, or maybe just over 40 organizations across the country, and many of them are affiliated with local law schools.
Some of them are affiliated with journalism schools.
And there's certainly a host of people working on this issue, not just to find the innocent people who are serving time but also to try and ensure that reforms are taken to help the problem end.
All right, everybody, that's Jason Craig.
He's from the Innocence Project.
Oh, and by the way, a friend sent me a link here in the chat room to the New York Times article, Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations, and they do say that we have 25% of the world's prisoners, 2.3 million criminals behind bars.
Wow.
All right, thank you very much for your time today.
I really appreciate your time on the show and what you guys are all doing.
So pass on my thanks to the rest, please, too.
Great.
Thanks so much.