David Kaczynski
Executive Director

Senator Eric Schneiderman (D, Manhattan) should be congratulated for sponsoring Senate Bill 6234, which establishes actual innocence as grounds for re-opening a criminal case. Over the last two years, Schneideman, chair of the Senate codes committee, has conducted a series of public hearings around New York State to investigate the causes behind New York State’s shameful record of wrongful convictions. His newly-introduced legislation, the “Actual Innocence Act,” represents an important step in the right direction. (See NYADP’s memorandum of support below

“What!?” you might ask, “We have to pass a new law to make sure that people who are found innocent will be set free from prison!?” The short answer is “yes” – but I will explain:

Non-lawyers commonly assume that the primary purpose of criminal appeals is to protect the innocent by uncovering wrongful convictions. On the contrary, the purpose of the criminal appeals process is to ensure consistency in the application of the law. As a result, some obviously guilty defendants have their convictions overturned because of procedural errors in their trials. When this happens, prosecutors have the option of trying them again and these defendants are usually re-convicted using a fairer process.

Unfortunately, some innocent but wrongly convicted defendants enjoy no similar privilege. Not, at any rate, if their trials were conducted without discernible procedural errors. In our legal system, trial juries are the fact-finders of record, and rarely does an appeals court deign to second-guess a jury. There are at least two problems with this way of doing business: 1. Juries sometimes make bad decisions; and 2. New evidence of actual innocence may surface years after a conviction was handed down.

A Westchester County jury got it wrong when it convicted Jeffrey Deskovic of murder and rape despite DNA evidence that clearly exonerated him. Doug Warney of Rochester spent additional years in prison despite new advances in DNA technology that enabled forensic investigators to conclude that Warney’s DNA did not match that of the killer. In both cases, prosecutors refused or, at best, dragged their feet before reopening cases in which trial juries had convicted innocent people. The challenge for the defendant is even greater when new evidence involves something less scientific than DNA – say, a recantation by an eyewitness or a jailhouse snitch, or strong circumstantial evidence pointing to a different perpetrator.