Sitting down with W. Tucker Carrington, a former public defense attorney in D.C. and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was a very informative experience. Currently, he is the Executive Director of the Mississippi Innocence Project. MIP, like similar ones in other States, concerns itself with investigating old cases in which there may have been false convictions. MIP is not exclusively interested in falsely convicted people, but in anyone who has been poorly served by the public defense system or other areas of the criminal justice system. Among their most publicly celebrated programs is, of course, their ongoing fight to exonerate falsely convicted people with the new techniques developed in DNA testing. Since its inception in 2007, MIP has been responsible for four exonerations, which can be read about here. Furthermore, The (national) Innocence Project has a hand in almost 200 such exonerations in the past decade. It’s a really unique and stunning program, not only because of the success stories.
Most intriguing to me about Mr. Carrington’s talk was not the stories of exonerations, but of the discoveries associated with those cases in the criminal justice system. This organization has a knack for finding that false convictions are not mere aberrations, but can be serially linked by an underlying problem. Mr. Carrington didn’t mention any of them explicitly, but I can imagine a few that Mississippi may have. Reading through the cases that I linked above might illumine for y’all what I’m getting at.
It’s exciting to see falsely convicted people go free. It’s also intriguing for me to hear about people pushing for legislation to try to prevent the past calamities. One example of such legislation being put forward by MIP is that which would require the search for and preservation of DNA material in a police investigation, because currently in Mississippi a police officer is not at all required to secure this kind of forensic evidence in an initial investigation.
As has been a common theme among those that the Elite Eight have interviewed, Mr. Carrington points at poverty as a major culprit in these cases. The demographic has peculiar details, but what’s almost universal among the cases of exonerated people is that they came from situations of poverty. Being in poverty often means that they’re uneducated about how they should be treated by the criminal justice system, especially the public defense lawyers, or on the side they have dealt too often with the criminal justice system to trust it to do its work well.
I don’t have many thoughts on all this, mostly because it’s so new to me. I think it’s a valiant effort to work on behalf of innocent men and women in the prisons, but I’m not really sure what’s at stake in the questions regarding future policy and the development of the criminal justice system to correct some of the old problems.
It holds the question of poverty as tightly as programs like the Teacher Corps. How might MIP be linked with MTC? (Amanda is doing a project on this and other topics, by the way.) Is there a way for schools to play a part in correcting the problems found in people who are undereducated about the legal system?
Most intriguing to me about Mr. Carrington’s talk was not the stories of exonerations, but of the discoveries associated with those cases in the criminal justice system. This organization has a knack for finding that false convictions are not mere aberrations, but can be serially linked by an underlying problem. Mr. Carrington didn’t mention any of them explicitly, but I can imagine a few that Mississippi may have. Reading through the cases that I linked above might illumine for y’all what I’m getting at.
It’s exciting to see falsely convicted people go free. It’s also intriguing for me to hear about people pushing for legislation to try to prevent the past calamities. One example of such legislation being put forward by MIP is that which would require the search for and preservation of DNA material in a police investigation, because currently in Mississippi a police officer is not at all required to secure this kind of forensic evidence in an initial investigation.
As has been a common theme among those that the Elite Eight have interviewed, Mr. Carrington points at poverty as a major culprit in these cases. The demographic has peculiar details, but what’s almost universal among the cases of exonerated people is that they came from situations of poverty. Being in poverty often means that they’re uneducated about how they should be treated by the criminal justice system, especially the public defense lawyers, or on the side they have dealt too often with the criminal justice system to trust it to do its work well.
I don’t have many thoughts on all this, mostly because it’s so new to me. I think it’s a valiant effort to work on behalf of innocent men and women in the prisons, but I’m not really sure what’s at stake in the questions regarding future policy and the development of the criminal justice system to correct some of the old problems.
It holds the question of poverty as tightly as programs like the Teacher Corps. How might MIP be linked with MTC? (Amanda is doing a project on this and other topics, by the way.) Is there a way for schools to play a part in correcting the problems found in people who are undereducated about the legal system?
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