Page 22 - Delaware Lawyer - Spring 2022

FEATURE
But Behind Bars
Megan J. Davies and Judith L. Ritter
Innocent,
The science doesn’t lie — or does it?
In February 2022, Reynaldo Munoz of Chicago became the 3,000th exoneree in the United States since 1989. There are many reasons why innocent people are too frequently convicted. Sometimes the wrongful conviction stems from misconduct by the prosecution or the police. Exonerations also occur after incriminating testimony by “snitches” seeking to save themselves is shown to have been perjured. False confessions, exculpatory evidence improperly withheld, and ineffective representation by defense counsel that prejudiced the trial will come to light years after a conviction. And, racial biases, explicit and implicit, impact jury selection and the way jurors interpret evidence.1
20 DELAWARE LAWYER SPRING 2022
One of the largest areas of concern is expert testimony of- fering flawed forensic analyses. In
the last two decades, much has been revealed about the system’s unjusti- fied or over-reliance on many forms of forensics. The exciting forensic
science development of the 1990s was the advent of increasingly sophis- ticated and trustworthy DNA testing. Not only did this science help law enforcement solve and prosecute crimes but it also provided a way for the wrongfully convicted to prove