Pennsylvania has convened a commission of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement officers and victims’ advocates to study the causes of wrongful convictions and make recommendations for preventing them in the state. Forensic errors, mistaken eyewitness identifications and false confessions have led to wrongful convictions around the nation, including 9 people from Pennsylvania who have been exonerated by DNA evidence.

The commission of 40 members was sponsored by Pennsylvania State Senator Stewart Greenleaf and will be chaired by Duquesne University law professor John T. Rago, who heads the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Sciene and Law. Among those on the panel are Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, Jr., public defender Michael Machen, police commissioner Charles Moffat, Common Pleas Senior Judge Robert E. Colville, as well as an exonerated death row inmate, a Johnstown priest, and a representative from the state attorney general’s office. The committee will review the cases of 198 DNA exonerees around the country to identify the most common causes of wrongful convictions. It will then issue a series of policy change recommendations that attempt to address the problems they identify.

Rago, who said he hopes the review will make the state’s criminal justice system “as best as human beings can,” noted, “Justice is served when a guilty person is convicted, but justice is also served when an innocent person is exonerated. And certainly justice is not served by convicting an innocent person… . With 2.5 million people incarcerated in the U.S., can anybody with a straight face say that they’re all guilty? No more than you could say they’re all innocent.” Rago said he proposed the study commission to Senator Greenleaf after hearing of several exonerations in Pennyslvania, including the release of Nicholas Yarris after he spent 21 years on Pennsylvania’s death row for a crime he did not commit. The commission held its first all-day meeting in Harrisburg on March 29.
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 31, 2007). See Innocence.

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