Righting Wrongful Convictions: the Fight for #MOInnocence
Advocates look to the legislature to add legal doctrine of "actual innocence" into Missouri law
By ML Smith1
We are all aware that the incarceration apparatus of the United States provides zero rehabilitation and is merely meant to warehouse those whose actions were an affront to what is legal.
Those who have been and are presently behind the razor-covered fences, steel bars, and cement block walls further know the reality of the trauma, degradation, and dehumanization that resides within penal institutions. People who are incarcerated try to find many ways to mentally, emotionally, and intellectually process their circumstances, which often involve determining how to learn from their mistakes, become better people, and make amends.
But what about when a person is innocent?
There is a trope that everyone in prison claims to be innocent, and we understand that this isn’t the case, yet on the same note, society as a whole does not understand the significant prevalence of innocent people being wrongfully convicted and unjustly incarcerated. If a person who is guilty has a difficult time being locked away in appalling conditions, can you imagine how people who are innocent feel? Theirs is a deeply set anguish on top of merely having to navigate the environment of penal institutions.
Within most prisons, people are expected to work; in all prisons, people are expected to behave in a decent way. How grueling is it, then, to be expected to focus on a task and remain cordial while your spirit is screaming of your innocence? You can’t have regular breakdowns; you have to live, to stay mentally and emotionally stable, to keep pushing daily, to keep fighting daily, in hopes that one day, someone with power on the outside finally will see you and will care enough to begin to fight for you. The existence of an innocent person stolen from their home and put in a cement-walled, steel-barred cell within a place of chaos and control, is one that most people cannot fathom and wouldn’t wish upon their worst adversary.
The wrongful conviction of innocent people is a systemic failure of justice and an ingrained reality within the criminal legal system. This phenomenon is not a quirk of the legal system that occurs sparingly, but a common outcome of a biased and inequitable court system.
Proving these facts is the data found on The National Registry of Exonerations2, which lists 2,991 exonerations as of February 24, 2022. The Registry began this tracking in 1989 and has calculated that these nearly 3,000 individuals have lost more than 26,500 years of their lives to wrongful conviction and unjust incarceration.
Many people will question how this happens, how could a system that is ‘meant’ to mete out justice, get it so wrong. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once said “This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.” This statement lays bare the reality that our legal system was not created and is not run on the premise of justice, but what is determined to be legal – or in accordance with the law.
In Missouri, I want to further the conversation of what laws can and should be instituted to quell the prevalence of innocent people being wrongfully convicted, as well as giving those presently convicted and incarcerated new hope in fighting against their wrongful convictions. The current legal procedures are very biased on the side of the prosecution and their witnesses. The witnesses, who have some type of incentive, both stated and assumed, to testify are collectively known as informants. These informants can be incarcerated or out in the public, but overall they receive, are offered, or assumed in a quid pro quo dynamic, to obtain a benefit for their proffered – or coerced – testimony.
The National Registry of Exonerations data reports that over 60% of exonerated innocent people had perjury & false accusations as the primary contributing factor that led to their wrongful conviction. This applies both nationally and in Missouri, where there have been 55 exonerated individuals since tracking began in 1989, and 34 of them were convicted primarily on perjured testimony and false accusations, including four people who were on death row. Yes, in addition to wrongfully-convicted people receiving extensive prison sentences and often life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, innocent people are on death row and have been executed. Death Penalty Information Center is a data source that tracks trends in capital punishment nationally. In February 2021, they issued a report called “The Innocence Epidemic,”3 which spoke on the 186 innocent people exonerated from death row, and in those cases, 67% had been convicted primarily on perjured testimony or false accusations.
Their data also shows that for every 8.3 persons executed a wrongfully convicted person is exonerated.
The #MoInnocence campaign has been created to foster the conversation surrounding the systemic issues within wrongful convictions, to shed light upon the failures of the criminal legal system in these outcomes, to uplift those who have been fighting for their freedom for decades, and to advocate for reforms of policies, procedures, and practices of how informant testimony is used and tracked.
The first initiative in this campaign is the support and push for H.B. 25234, the Informant Reliability Act, which will get Missouri on a similar footing as other states, such as Texas and Oklahoma. In this state, it still much is easier to convict an innocent person than it is to right a wrongful conviction.
Please visit bit.ly/MoInnocence to sign the petition for H.B. 2523 in order to stay updated on ways to support and amplify this bill. Together we can bring #MoInnocence to Missouri!
ML Smith is the Director of Community Engagement and Outreach for Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.