Rob Warden, who is step­ping down as the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, recent­ly spoke about the work of find­ing and free­ing inno­cent defen­dants. Warden helped exon­er­ate almost 60 peo­ple, includ­ing many who had been sen­tenced to death. He not­ed that some of the suc­cess of the Center was the result of tim­ing: ​“Part of it was the for­tu­itous advent of DNA foren­sic tech­nol­o­gy, which sud­den­ly showed that many peo­ple had been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed. And that, in turn, gave cre­dence to the non-DNA cas­es where there was per­sua­sive evi­dence of wrong­ful con­vic­tions. It just changed the momen­tum.” He said that expos­ing flaws in the jus­tice sys­tem has been one of the Center’s most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions: “[V]irtually nobody believed that peo­ple would con­fess to crimes they had­n’t com­mit­ted. We have been extreme­ly impor­tant in expos­ing the phe­nom­e­non of false con­fes­sions and the psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na that lead to it. And we’ve exposed the fal­lac­i­es of evi­dence that were often used to con­vict peo­ple, includ­ing mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of foren­sic results and the use of so-called jail­house snitch tes­ti­mo­ny. People nev­er real­ly took that seri­ous­ly until we start­ed show­ing that they were lead­ing to seri­ous mis­car­riages of justices.”

(K. Sloan, ​“Four Decades and 60 Exonerations Later…,” National Law Journal, Sept. 11, 2013.) See also Innocence and Arbitrariness.

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