by Donna Hicks

Created on: September 22, 2010

Most people may assume that all convicted felons serving time in prison deserve to be there. After all, if they were found guilty by a jury or judge and then sentenced to prison, then they have committed the crime, we may assume. Our assumption would be very wrong. In fact convicting the innocent has become a very hot topic that has, in some cases, caused a great deal of embarrassment for some states and jurisdictions.

Convicting the Innocent

When one repeatedly hears of cases where a convicted felon is exonerated because it is now proved that he or she did not commit the crime after all, one may wonder how a person was wrongly convicted when the American Justice System is supposed to be so great. How, with evidence presented at trial, can a jury or judge convict an innocent person of felonies that he or she did not commit? In recent years, headlines have offered details of inmates who have sat in prison for many years for crimes they did not commit. Some have been on Death Row for years. In fact, in an Associated Press article published in USA Today, the American Bar Association revealed that thousands of innocent people, usually those who cannot afford the best legal counsel, are convicted of committing crimes for which they are innocent because they are pressured to plead guilty. A study conducted by the ABA found that legal services for indigent clients are “in a state of crisis.” The report revealed staggering statistics of the number of people wrongly convicted and for the number of years these inmates were wrongly incarcerated.

Cases of the Innocent

The Innocence Project is widely known for its tireless efforts to exonerate wrongly convicted people and working to change the justice system so the innocent are not sitting in America's prisons. According to The Innocence Project, there have been nearly 300 post-conviction DNA exonerations in recent years. Profiles of many of the freed innocents are available on the website. One may wonder if it is really true that people can actually serve decades in prison for crimes they did not commit. Perhaps one may hear the truth from people such as Phillip Bivens and Bobby Ray Dixon, who with the help of the Innocence Project, were freed after nearly three decades of incarceration for rape. ABC-News 5 reported that in May 2010, Raymond Towler, of Cleveland, Ohio had been declared innocent after DNA tests proved he was not the man who committed the 1981 rape of an 11 year old girl. The Justice Project

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