Wednesday, May 27, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
RIGHTS-U.S.: DNA, Perseverance Win Freedom for Innocent Inmates
Enrique Gili
- Behind the double security doors at the California Western School of Law campus is a small, unconventional legal practice embedded inside the academic institution.
Decorating the walls of the Innocence Project are framed newspaper articles of headline-making cases of former clients. Those behind the project – lawyers and law students – have won freedom and exoneration for clients who have spent years behind bars convicted of murder.
The ticket to freedom is often DNA evidence that proves the client did not commit the crime for which he or she was convicted.
DNA is genetic material unique to each individual, and is found in blood, hair and tissue. This “invisible” evidence can be left behind at a crime scene, often unbeknownst to perpetrator.
Since 1989, 14 convicted murderers in the United States owe their freedom – and, in death penalty cases, their lives – to the role DNA played in overturning their sentences. Some of these cases were due to the successful work of the Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, pioneers in the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases.
Nearly 200 U.S. convictions for other crimes have been overturned using DNA evidence. The average amount of time the exonerated spent in prison was 12 years. They come from 31 of the 50 U.S. states.
“We’re not fooling anyone when we say, for the most part, the criminal justice system gets it right,” Jeff Chinn, assistant director of the California Innocence Project, told IPS, noting that the system is not infallible and mistakes occur on a regular basis.
He cited faulty eyewitness accounts as one of the principle grounds for overturning prison sentences. The Innocence Project has identified false confessions and dishonest officials as other sources of unjust convictions.
Chinn, a practicing attorney, is responsible for selecting the local cases where miscarriages of justice appear to have taken place. They involve inmates who have exhausted all other avenues of defence in a criminal justice system that has left them financially drained.
The Innocence Project at California Western School of Law has a staff of four full-time attorneys. Chinn divides the caseload between them and 12 students chosen by competition. Currently they are working on more than 50 cases.
Some 25 other university law schools across the United States have similar legal offices belonging to the Innocence Project network.
Chinn estimates that between three and four percent of the U.S. prison population may actually be innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. In California alone, the numbers of innocent inmates could be thousands, and nationally the figure could be tens of thousands.
There are now 2.1 million men and women prison inmates in the United States, according to the Justice Department. California’s prison population totals about 170,000.
Texas – the state responsible for 40 percent of U.S. executions over the last 10 years – has seen some of the most sensational cases of overturned convictions. Over the past five years, 13 inmates there have been exonerated, according to Chinn.
In the U.S., 37 of the 50 states have capital punishment laws on the books. Also, the federal government can impose the death penalty for certain crimes.
“Each wrongful conviction shows that the justice system is flawed,” he said, noting that in such a system there is always the risk that wrongfully-convicted people might be executed.
Elsewhere in the country, the meticulous work of the Innocence Project activists, especially their success in using DNA evidence to overturn convictions, has given a boost to the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty.
So far Texas has turned a blind eye to the evidence. Twelve of the 13 executions in the United States this year have been carried out in that southern state.
But there are signs of change. On Apr. 15, The Dallas Morning News, the state’s highest-circulation newspaper, called for an end to the death penalty, reversing a 100-year-old stance.
“This (editorial) board has lost confidence that the state of Texas can guarantee that every inmate it executes is truly guilty of murder. We do not believe that any legal system devised by inherently flawed human beings can determine with moral certainty the guilt of every defendant convicted of murder,” it wrote, citing the 13 cases of people exonerated in the state for crimes they did not commit.
“Exonerations keep coming, and the doubts keep piling up,” but the politicians do not react.
The newspaper concluded: “The state cannot impose death – an irrevocable sentence – with absolute certainty in all cases. Therefore the state should not impose it at all.”
On the following day, citing specifically the DNA exonerations, the newspaper called for the death penalty in Texas to be replaced by life imprisonment without parole. “It is harsh. It is just. And it is final without being irreversible,” it said.
Back on the California Western campus, second-year student Taren Kern is working on a case she has been assigned by the Innocence Project. Old-fashioned leg-work and latest advances in forensic science and DNA are at hand to help her overturn convictions.
Each student working on the Innocence Project must be prepared to spend 20 hours a week re-investigating closed criminal cases. They are working on appellate cases that can drag on well beyond their day of graduation.
Over the summer, Kern will switch camps and spend time gaining experience in a state prosecutor’s office. “Even though I might want to be a prosecutor, this experience at the Innocence Project has opened my eyes,” she told IPS. “I would honestly try as hard as possible to look at all the facts.”
It is this facing of facts – the ever-growing number of convictions overturned by the painstaking, meticulous work of a non-profit law organisation – that is playing a role in an awakening in the United States to the fact that mistakes can be made and innocent people may have be sent to the death chambers.
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