Law Commons^™

Reliability Lost, False Confessions Discovered, Mark A. Godsey

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The advent of post-conviction DNA testing in the past twenty years has spawned an Innocence Revolution, in which hundreds of Americans imprisoned or on death row for serious crimes like murder and rape have been conclusively proven innocent and released. From studying the cases of wrongful convictions, we now know that eyewitness identification is not nearly as reliable as once believed. We also know that hundreds of innocent people have been convicted through the use of junk science, such as bite mark analysis or microscopic hair comparison, which DNA testing has proven to be wildly inaccurate. Most importantly for my …