By Dave Lucas
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Albany, NY – On Wednesday afternoon the New York State Bar Association unveiled six new bills that address the leading causes of wrongful convictions in the State. Capital District Bureau Chief Dave Lucas reports.
Until two years ago, no one in the United States had studied or used data and evidence to determine the root causes of wrongful convictions. Thanks to the work done by the State Bar's Task Force on Wrongful Convictions, New York is the first state in the nation to address the myriad of issues involved in wrongful convictions. A team of legislators have written six bills, based on a 2009 report issued by the task force. Bar Past President Bernice Leber created the panel in 2008: The Task Force examined 53 cases where a defendant was wrongfully convicted of a crime but later exonerated. Leber says the innocent wait on average 11-point-2 years in prison for justice, while a single compensatory award in New York can range as high as 2-Million dollars.
The Task Force identified the leading causes of wrongful convictions as identification procedures, government practices, defense practices, mishandling of forensic evidence, the use of false confessions and the improper use of jailhouse informants. Each of the six individual issues identified by the task force is addressed by one of the six bills. In a 2007 report the Innocence Project concluded that New York leads the nation in wrongful convictions overturned with DNA testing but lags behind other states in enacting policy reforms to make the criminal justice system more fair and effective.