The Jackson Free Press has an excellent article about Mississippi’s new Innocence Project, led by Tucker Carrington, and started with the help of John Grisham.

Maw and Carrington identified three major areas of concentration for changing Mississippi’s laws. First on the list is enacting legislation requiring courts to preserve evidence—rape kits, blood and other types of biological material—after conviction. Twenty years ago, few anticipated that DNA science would play such a crucial role in proving guilt or innocence. And it would take a crystal ball to foresee what new science will emerge 20 years from now.

“It’s a huge problem,” Grisham said. “There are a lot of guys at Parchman right now who have been there for many years who have claims of innocence that should be pursued, but the evidence is not there. There may have been DNA 20 years ago, but the evidence is gone. Those are hopeless cases. And it’s not just in Mississippi, that’s everywhere.”

Maw mentioned one case where the Supreme Court ordered DNA testing 25 years after the case. “Of course, the evidence had been thrown away,” she said. In another case, a 17-year-old black defendant convicted of raping a white woman in Jackson in 1981 “doesn’t even have a transcript of his trial,” she said. “They (originally) had a rape kit in that case; they could have done testing.”

[...]

Still, one of the biggest barriers to overcome in Mississippi and much of the Deep South is the perception that wrongful convictions simply aren’t a problem.

“It’s a very hard sell in a lot of jurisdictions,” Grisham said. “A lot of it is race-based. I mean, the white community does not believe it’s a problem. That’s true in a lot of states, not just Mississippi. If you go into the black community, they know. They know someone who has been pushed around, abused or wrongfully convicted. … What we’ve got to do first is convince the people that there’s a problem with the system.”

It’s changing, though. Yesterday, I put up a post about the former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court becoming active in that state’s Innocence Project. There’s a former chief justice now doing defense work in Mississippi, too. Grisham’s partner in the innocence movement is fellow author and former federal prosecutor Scott Turrow. And of course, they aren’t the only former judges and prosecutors to have their eyes opened to the problem.

The Free Press also did an interview with Grisham here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 12:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under General Criminal Justice, Innocence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.