From The Washington Post: The development of DNA testing in the 1990s has revealed that a great deal of the forensic evidence used to convict defendants in previous decades was false and unscientific. However, many of these convictions still have yet to be overturned.
“Our courts strive for finality because, the thinking goes, if verdicts can be overturned on a whim, the public will lose faith in the integrity of the system. And if the courts were to truly reckon with the mess wrought by bad forensics, we’d see a lot of overturned verdicts, certainly enough to sow doubt about the system.
But refusing to rectify unjust verdicts doesn’t preserve the integrity of our system, only the appearance of it. Meanwhile, innocent people remain behind bars.”
