They Really Didn't Do It

Really. The Mississippi Innocent Project is a movie about two guys who spent half a century combined on death row. For nothing. They never committed the crime for which the State of Mississippi locked them up and threw away the key. Until the Mississippi Innocence Project along with their New York counterpart started putting a few pieces together after getting a hand written jailhouse letter. This movie is a must see for anyone in law enforcement, all judges, and all law students. It raises very serious questions about how the criminal justice system works and doesn't in some cases in this country. http://mississippiinnocencefilm.com/about/


     DNA exhonerated these gentlemen. How could they get convicted in the first place? The rush to judgment included what was depicted as shady forensic autopsies coupled with an alleged expert witness Dentist type who tried to match up what he mistakenly thought were 'bite marks' on bodies
that were thrown in bodies of water with the dental molds of suspects. Problem is those were not bite marks and it looks like the dental molds themselves made the marks. The evidence looked in hindsight totally fabricated and the experts looked like professional charletans.

  This raises some serious procedural questions.
Some that could be federally addressed.
First, where there is newly discovered evidence or newly available testing methodologies to evaluate evidence (DNA technology didn't exist when they were convicted but old samples could be used twenty years later) this should extend federal Habeus statutes of limitations nationally. Secondly,
whenever there has been an overturned conviction based on post conviction evidence analysis it should be a requirement that ALL the cases on which that particular expert gave his 'beyond a doubt' or 'medical certainty' testimony should be evaluated for reliability of his testimony. Did this dentist character for example (who testified in some 50 cases in that county) pull the Dental bite mark theory on anyone else? Seems if anyone else was convicted on that charade they should be retried with full opportunity to cross examine the dentist character.

  Which leads me to the next - imagine if.
Imagine if there were a national database wherein the experts used for every Capital case or every case where someone got a sentence of over say 50 years in which there was a post conviction reversal were identified and all the cases on which they testified were also identified.
Does such a database exist anywhere? There have been almost 300 death row inmates released as wrongfully convicted since they started DNA testing. Almost 300 people were locked up and almost killed by the state until we discovered they did NOTHING to deserve being locked up. Makes you wonder how many actually went to their death when we didn't have DNA to test.  Frightening.

This leads me to the last conclusion- No, the State should not be putting people to death. Ever.

MISSISSIPPI INNOCENCE - Trailer from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo.