Opinion: I co-founded the California Innocence Project to bring justice to the wrongly convicted [Opinion]
is a law professor at California Western School of Law and director of the California Innocence Project.
In 1995, I read a newspaper article about a young woman in her early 20s named Marilyn Mulero. Marilyn was awaiting execution in Illinois after being convicted of a double homicide. The article said she was sentenced to death on a plea bargain, but I didn’t think that could be accurate. How could anyone be sentenced to death on a plea bargain? A plea bargain is supposed to be a bargain — meaning you give up your right to a trial in exchange for a lesser sentence.
I recruited some law students to work on the case with me, and soon our investigation revealed strong evidence of her innocence, including falsified witness testimony and a corrupt detective who has now been linked to dozens of wrongful convictions. Marilyn’s death sentence was reversed, but the courts refused to withdraw her guilty plea. I litigated that issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it denied review of the issue.
Since the 1990s, more than 70 innocence organizations have been launched in the United States. Many more have been launched in Europe, Asia, the South Pacific and Latin America. In the United States alone, as the result of our work, and the work of private criminal defense attorneys, public defenders and conviction review units in prosecutors’ offices, more than 3,315 cases of wrongfully convicted innocent people have been documented since 1989.
Now that it is clear innocent people are regularly convicted in our criminal legal system, the big question is why? That question inspired me to write my new book,Looking back at my decades working in the system, and the work of my colleagues around the world, I identified 10 of the leading causes of wrongful convictions.
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