ياما في السجن مظاليم(جيمس بين) يعانق فضاءات الحرية بعد 35 سنة(توجد دموع)..

Quote: The InnocenceProject Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law 55 5th Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10003 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, January 17, 2002 CONTACT: www.innocenceproject.org. AS 100TH INNOCENT PRISONER IS FREED BY DNA TESTS, INNOCENCE NETWORK CONVENES TO MAP THE FUTURE OF "NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT" IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE The Innocence Project - a legal clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York that has helped build a national movement to free the wrongfully convicted - announced today that the number of innocent prisoners in the United States who have been exonerated based upon post-conviction DNA testing has reached 100. The Project will celebrate with the 99th and 100th exonerees - Marvin Anderson of Virginia, and Larry Mayes of Indiana - as members of its national Innocence Network gather for their annual conference at the California Western School of Law in San Diego, January 18-20, 2002. These 100 cases, say the Project's co-directors, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, mark a "revolution" in this country's criminal justice system over the last decade and have sparked a "new civil rights movement" to reform the system's ills. This has been made possible by the availability of DNA testing that can conclusively establish a prisoner's innocence, allowing advocates in The Innocence Network to prove what they and others have long contended - that a system replete with eyewitness error, official misconduct, and race- and economic-based inequities has resulted in an unconscionable number of wrongful convictions. Central to this movement, say the Network's members, is to expose the flaws that pervade the justice system as a whole, implement vital reforms, and ensure that claims of innocence do not go unheard. "While we should celebrate the ability of this remarkable DNA technology to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that serious errors have been made in cases where testable physical evidence exists, and to allow us to remedy those wrongs," emphasize Scheck and Neufeld, "we should be equally troubled by what we have learned in these 100 cases about the widespread errors that led to these convictions in the first place. The number of exonerations to date simply pales in comparison to the daunting number of claims that have not yet been heard because these prisoners lack either the means or the right to prove their innocence in a court of law." The revelations of the system's flaws occasioned by these 100 individual cases have already led to a host of legal and policy reforms that were unimaginable a decade ago. With the public outraged by revelations that innocent persons have languished for years in prison, many of them under death sentences, reform efforts by advocates for the accused have met with remarkable success. These have included: * Passage of over two dozen state laws strengthening the rights of convicted prisoners to access and present DNA evidence to prove their innocence; * Implementation of critical reforms in state and local police departments to improve the reliability of eyewitness identifications and confessions; * Exposure of fraudulent and discredited forensic "science" practiced by expert witnesses for the prosecution, leading to the reexamination of hundreds of convictions that were based on their testimony; * Calls to suspend executions in states around the nation while fundamental issues of fairness and reliability of the death penalty are addressed; * Passage of over a dozen statutes providing compensation for the innocent upon their exoneration and release from prison. Notably, many of these reforms have been endorsed by key members of the judiciary, police, and prosecutorial agencies. "Freeing the innocent is fully consistent with good law enforcement," note Scheck and Neufeld, "since every wrongful conviction means that the real criminal has not been brought to justice." Indeed, in several cases - most recently, Mr. Anderson's - the same DNA technology that exonerated the Network's clients has then been used to identify the actual perpetrator of the crime. DNA and the Future But the struggle to free the innocent - and to reform the system that caused their convictions in the first place - is far from over, say Scheck and Neufeld. This weekend, members of the 30 chapters in the Project's national Innocence Network will gather in San Diego to plot the course of their civil rights agenda - assessing the progress they have made thus far, and charting a course of action for the future of their movement. The systemic ills at the root of the 100 exonerations thus far - which include faulty eyewitness identification, police and prosecutorial misconduct, inexperienced and undercompensated counsel for the poor, and sloppy forensic work - are no less present in cases where DNA-testable evidence does not exist, or has been irretrievably lost or damaged. Indeed, this is true of the vast majority of cases that come to the Network's attention, according to Project staff. Chapters of the national Innocence Network are deluged by requests for assistance and are struggling to fill this compelling need. At the Innocence Project's New York office at Cardozo Law School alone, for example, there are over 2000 such requests from inmates and their families which have not yet even been read by the Project's intake staff; thousands more have been reviewed but are still under consideration, or are clients whom the Network is directly representing or for whom they are attempting to secure legal counsel. These constraints, say members of the Innocence Network, are exacerbated by outdated laws at the state and national level that pose additional barriers to proving one's innocence. They include strict time limits on challenges to criminal convictions and unacceptably low funding for indigent criminal defense, especially in death penalty cases. To this end, members of the Innocence Network say that their top goals for the movement's next decade of reforms include the following: * Passage of the Innocence Protection Act, a federal law to guarantee nationwide access to DNA evidence without time limits; provide competent counsel for defendants in capital cases; and ensure compensation for persons who have been wrongfully convicted;] * Take the lessons learned from the first 100 DNA exonerations to change law enforcement procedures at the state and local level and reduce the risk of wrongful convictions in the future; and * Creation of innocence commissions in each state, with the power to investigate the causes of wrongful convictions and recommend comprehensive changes to redress them; and * Adoption of a nationwide death penalty moratorium to ensure that the ultimate penalty of death is not meted out on the innocent until the system's flaws have been fully examined and corrected. Free at Last: Marvin Anderson and Larry Mayes The cases of Marvin Anderson and Larry Mayes - the 99th and 100th exonerees, respectively - vividly illustrate the causes of wrongful convictions that have been shown in case after case in the Innocence Network docket. Marvin Anderson, a 37-year-old African American, served fifteen years in prison for the 1982 rape of a white woman in Hanover County, Virginia, before being paroled in 1997 and exonerated by DNA testing this December. "His only crime," explains Neufeld, "was 'dating while black.'" The fact that then-18-year-old Mr. Anderson was known in the small town to be dating a local white woman was the only "evidence" linking him to the rapist, after the victim told police that her assailant had bragged about prior sexual experiences with white women. An all-white jury - empaneled after prosecutors systematically excluded minorities from the panel - convicted Mr. Anderson based solely upon an eyewitness identification by the victim which, as DNA tests now prove, was tainted by sloppy police work. Mr. Anderson's case is the first under Virginia's newly enacted DNA testing law. That amendment exempts such evidence from the strict statewide ban on all claims of innocence that are raised more than 21 days after conviction. It also demonstrates the power of DNA testing to show the error in excluding other kinds of evidence of innocence that are too often dismissed by police and prosecutors as "unreliable." That was the verdict pronounced in Mr. Anderson's first, unsuccessful effort to expunge his conviction in 1988, in which a judge refused to credit another suspect's sworn testimony that he, and not Mr. Anderson, was the real rapist. The veracity of the 1988 confession was proved last month, however, by the same DNA sample that exonerated Anderson, after it was found to be a "match" in the state's databank for the confessor's DNA. Larry Mayes, the 100th exoneree, served a staggering 21 years of an 80-year prison term for the rape of a woman at an Indiana gas station, before DNA tests on a long-buried rape kit finally set him free on December 21, 2001. Students from the Innocence Project's clinic at Cardozo Law School were told for nearly two years that the kit had been lost, before one student finally convinced a diligent clerk to conduct the successful search in the courthouse basement. Professor Fran Hardy of the University of Indiana School of Law's Innocence Project represented Mr. Mayes and secured his release within days of receiving the DNA test results. Mr. Mayes, like Mr. Anderson, was convicted solely on a mistaken eyewitness identification by the victim - who had also failed to identify him as her attacker in two separate lineups where he was present. The likely cause of her single misidentification of Mayes (when viewing a pretrial photo array) came to light 20 years later, only after his attorneys petitioned for DNA testing and the victim was contacted by new prosecutors who had taken over the case. At that time, the prosecution finally disclosed the damning fact that the victim was hypnotized by police prior to viewing Mayes' photograph. Mr. Mayes - whose father, daughter, and son all passed away during his 21-year incarceration - now lives with his mother and works at a job referred to him by a sympathetic Indiana state prison guard. Further information about The Innocence Network, including case histories of all 100 persons exonerated to date, is also available on the Project's website: www.innocenceproject.org. # # #