A Georgia man is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday for killing a police officer in 1989, even though the case against him has withered in recent years as most of the key witnesses at his trial have recanted and in some cases said they lied under pressure from police......"A Not So Perfect Match: How Near-DNA Matches Can Incriminate Relatives Of Criminals" reported by Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes.
At the heart of Davis's difficulties is a law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing -- the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
The legislation was aimed at bomber Timothy J. McVeigh but has had far broader consequences: It limits the reasons for which federal courts can overturn death penalty convictions. In Davis's case, it has helped block the exploration of witnesses' statements that they had lied at trial.
Before the law, the federal courts intervened to provide "relief" to death row inmates -- that is, a new trial, new sentencing hearing or a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment -- in about 45 percent of cases, though the rate was declining. But between 2000 and 2007, federal courts intervened to provide such relief to the death row inmate in about 10 percent of cases, according to a forthcoming study.
According to this story, the interpretation of DNA evidence has progressed to a point where it can now be used to implicate the close relatives of someone whose DNA is in the FBI database in a crime. Until recently, to protect privacy, the FBI would not release the name of the person whose DNA was identified that as a likely relative of the person who committed the crime to police unless the record came from the same state as the request. Now the FBI will pass the request to the state from which the DNA sample came, and allow them to decide whether to release the identification. Of course, knowing that a close relative of a person left DNA at the scene of a crime provides a great lead for solving the crime. However, the large data bases of DNA mean that many people could come under suspicion for large numbers of crimes although completely innocent.
The show presented a real case in which an innocent man was convicted of a rape and served 19 years in prison. An appeal after 10 years recognized that the DNA found in the semen left in the rape victim was not that of the prisoner, but left him in jail anyway. Eventually, the semen was tracked to the brother of a convicted felon, who then confessed to the original crime. The prisoner was finally freed. His freedom was made possible by screening the DNA data base, finding the brother, and tracking the siblings.
Comment: In the first of these stories, the Government is making it harder to use new evidence to overturn convictions and in the second, it is making it easier.
The two stories taken together illustrate that the legal system can make errors of convicting the innocent as well as failing to convict the guilty. DNA evidence is a new form of information, and as such can improve decision making in criminal processes. It can also, of course, be misused and be used to invade privacy and reduce personal liberty.
The stories also illustrate how legislative and regulatory processes to change the way legal institutions treat information and make decisions. JAD
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