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Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel In Dna Cases: A Re-Appraisal Of The Effectiveness Of Strickland V. Washington Judges, Albert E. Scherr

Law Faculty Scholarship

The advent of forensic DNA evidence has made possible the prosecution of many crimes that would otherwise be un-prosecutable or that would have been weak cases, if prosecuted. At the same time, forensic DNA technology has raised very substantial concerns about the reliability of evidence previously viewed as the gold standard in proof Wrongful convictions by the Innocence Project and others have established that eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, bad forensics and mistaken guilty pleas occur. The much lesser known but still very troubling concern is with the performance of defense counsel in cases in which the prosecution has forensic DNA …