Spare the innocent
Senate Democrats have a chance to cut number of wrongful convictions
Another innocent man has been freed. When will state legislators respond to what can only be called a crisis of wrongful conviction in New York? Perhaps in January, when Democrats take over the State Senate.
Albany has been woefully uninterested in this subject. New York has the nation’s third-highest number of people exonerated, but it has done little to keep the law from devouring more innocent suspects. The main obstacle has been the State Senate, where Republicans have shown virtually no interest in reforming the system.
It’s not as though this is a minor issue. Twenty-four New Yorkers have been exonerated through DNA testing, according to The Innocence Project, and 13 of thoses cases involved witness misidentification. That’s how Steven Barnes wound up in prison almost 20 years ago, convicted of a murder he did not commit.
Now 42, Barnes was convicted in 1989 of murdering acquaintance Kimberly Simon in Oneida County. The conviction was based largely on circumstantial evidence; witnesses testified they might have seen him with Simon or near the crime scene, according to the Utica Observer-Dispatch.
DNA testing, then in its infancy, was of no use. Further tests in the mid-1990s also were inconclusive, because of the continuing limits of the science.
But techniques have dramatically improved since then, and a new round of tests led to Barnes’ release from prison on Tuesday, two decades after he was wrongfully convicted.
It is not specifically the fault of state legislators that, at least 24 times in recent years, state criminal courts have convicted innocent people, including Anthony Capozzi and Lynn DeJac, both of Buffalo. But it is emphatically their fault that the state’s criminal justice system continues to operate in largely the same way as when it produced these wrongful convictions.
It doesn’t have to be that way. New York can reform witness identification procedures. It can require the video recording of custodial interrogations, thereby reducing the peculiar but nonetheless real phenomenon of false confessions. Instead, it has done nothing.
The state couldn’t even bring itself to form an “innocence commission,” which would review the state’s wrongful convictions and recommend appropriate reforms to reduce their likelihood. Fortunately, the New York State Bar Association took on that urgent task earlier this year. It, at least, understands how wrongful conviction undermines the criminal justice system.
It shouldn’t have been hard for Senate Republicans to understand that this is a tough-on-crime issue. When the wrong person is convicted, the actual criminal is left free to continue preying on victims. That is exactly what happened in Erie County, when Capozzi was wrongly convicted of rapes in Delaware Park. That left the actual rapist, Altemio Sanchez, free to continue raping — and soon to start murdering — women in Western New York.
Democrats will take over the Senate in January. This is an obvious and comparatively easy problem for them to address. No state can ever guarantee that the innocent will never be wrongfully convicted, taken from their families and locked behind bars. People aren’t perfect, so their systems can’t be either.
But New York can do a whole lot better than it has. It should do that.
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