If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong

Wrongful Convictions: How many innocent Americans are behind bars?

It’s notable that one of the few places in America where a district attorney has specifically dedicated staff and resources to seeking out bad convictions—Dallas County, Texas—has produced more exonerations than all but a handful of states. That’s partly because Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is more interested in reopening old cases than his counterparts elsewhere, and partly because of a historical quirk: Since the early 1980s the county has been sending biological crime scene evidence to a private crime lab for testing, and that lab has kept the evidence well preserved. Few states require such evidence be preserved once a defendant has exhausted his appeals, and in some jurisdictions the evidence is routinely destroyed at that point.

“I don’t think there was anything unique about the way Dallas was prosecuting crimes,” Watkins told me in 2008. “It’s unfortunate that other places didn’t preserve evidence too. We’re just in a unique position where I can look at a case, test DNA evidence from that period, and say without a doubt that a person is innocent.…But that doesn’t mean other places don’t have the same problems Dallas had.”

If the rest of the country has an actual (but undetected) wrongful conviction rate as high as Dallas County’s, the number of innocents in prison for felony crimes could be in the tens of thousands.

It's been watching the work of Watkins and the Innocence Project here in Dallas that has convinced me that the hang 'em high philosophy that may have served America (and particularly Texas and the frontier) in earlier eras is no longer necessary or desirable. Our government (and by that I mean the whole apparatus of federal and state government) isn't competent to lock people up, let alone kill them. Releasing everyone and starting over isn't an option, and I find it hard to believe that we'll will get much better at this, even though Watkins has demonstrated obvious ways to do so. So wrongly convicted people like the ones described in this article end up as the grease on the wheels of civil society. And just saying it that way makes me feel cynical and tired.