British Jurist, William Blackstone, famously stated, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer” (Norris, Bonventre, Redlich, & Acker, 2010). The number of innocent people getting their convictions overturned is steadily increasing in the United States. The recent surge in overturned convictions is a product of The Innocence Project. The Innocence Project is an organization that was founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law. The purpose of their organization is to exonerate individuals have been wrongly convicted through DNA testing. They also work to help reform the criminal justice system to prevent further miscarriages of justice (Help us, 2017). The Innocence Project has …show more content…
The statistics are staggering. In 1932, Edwin Borchard conducted a groundbreaking study that examined 65 cases of wrongful convictions. He found that just under half of those wrongfully convicted had errors in the eyewitness testimony. Since then more studies have been conducted that agree with Borchard’s study. Between 1989 and 2003, Samuel Gross and his colleagues found that 219 out 340 cases had errors in eyewitness testimony. Seventy-six percent of the first 250 exonerations with The Innocence Project had eyewitness errors, and about half of those cases were death penalty cases (Norris, Bonventre, Redlich, & Acker, 2010). As humans we cannot retain or retrieve memories perfectly especially after a long period of time has passed. Our memories can also be corrupted or influenced without us even knowing it. Eyewitness testimony has proven time and time again to be an unreliable source of …show more content…
Those who have been wrongly convicted lost time with loved ones, missed opportunities for work experience and growth, and had to suffer in a violent and lonely prison environment (West & Meterko, 2015). On average, exonerees spent 12 years in prison (Chang, 2008). After release, they struggled to find decent jobs, housing, and services for mental health. They may have developed mental health issues in prison that they didn’t have before being convicted such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Seventy-three percent of exonerees were compensated, but it took 2 to 2 1\2 years to receive it. If they were not compensated they had to rely on family members and charity to move on with their lives (West & Meterko,