DNA Analysis: "of forty cases reviewed, almost half have ended with complete exoneration of the men originally convicted"

Patricia J. Williams writes for The Nation:

Johnnie Earl Lindsey spent twenty-six years in prison for a rape he did not commit. He was convicted based on the victim's misidentification of him from a photograph shown to her a year after the crime occurred. The jury found her perception more credible than the word of Lindsey's supervisor, who had testified that Lindsey had been at work at the time of the assault.

Today's extremely precise technologies for analyzing DNA were not dreamed of two decades ago, when Lindsey was arrested and tried. By ordinary measures, therefore, he had had his day in court. The victim asserted his guilt; he asserted his innocence; a jury of their peers believed that her story was true beyond any reasonable doubt. As a formal matter, the conviction withstands the requirements of due process, no reason to look back.

Luckily, Johnnie Earl Lindsey's case fell within the jurisdiction of Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins. Watkins, who in 2008 became Dallas's first black district attorney, inaugurated a unit within his office in conjunction with the Innocence Project of Texas to re-examine the forensic material in closed cases using improved methods of DNA analysis. The results have been nothing short of stunning: of forty cases reviewed, almost half have ended with complete exoneration of the men originally convicted--nineteen men who lost an average of twenty years each while wrongly imprisoned.