Imagine being sentenced to death for a crime you didn’t commit. Each day, you wake up and place your feet on the cold concrete floor of your confined jail cell. You put on your state-issued uniform and look out from behind the bars to see nothing but security guards. You’re alone, separated from the other prisoners in your own little maximum-security precinct because of the threat you’re seen as. Imagine this being your life every day for more than ten years, knowing that each and every minute you’re paying the price for a crime someone else committed — this is the sad reality of thousands of men and women in the United States today.
Each year, innocent citizens are mistaken and tried as felons because of a failing judicial system. From incompetent lawyers to poor eyewitness testimonies and improper evaluation of DNA, it’s no surprise this has become a re-occurring problem.
The fate of the defendant is placed in the hands of the lawyer, whose job is to plead for and prove their innocence to the jury. However, a lawyer’s failure to do their job can have severe consequences for the defendant. In addition, the recent reduction of court-appointed attorneys [due to problems with budgets](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/08/sequester-effects_n_3039739.html) can cause the remaining attorneys to take on more cases. Their caseload can then render them unable to properly represent each of their defendants, leading to the conviction of innocent people.
Besides lawyer malpractice, eyewitnesses cause one of the largest problems in misidentifying the correct perpetrator. Eyewitness testimony can be an important piece of evidence in the court, but is [often found to be unreliable](http://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/trialevidence/articles/winterspring2012-0512-eyewitness-testimony-unreliable.html). In a majority of these cases, the wrongfully convicted holds close resemblance to the felon, making it almost impossible to decipher the two apart. It’s also common for the perpetrator to be missing from the investigation lineup, rendering the situation almost hopeless for the wrongfully accused.
Improper evaluation of DNA [also carries a lot of weight](http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Unreliable-Limited-Science.php) in wrongfully convicting an innocent person. While DNA analysis is what usually exonerates these innocent people, the original mistakes of forensic scientists can have repercussions for the defendant. A lawyer’s argument and eyewitness testimonies do play a large part of conviction in the courts, but the analysis of DNA is seen as solid evidence that cannot be argued with. Rape cases have been found to be the most common in which DNA is misidentified. During testing, scientists often fail to recognize that the bodily fluids collected at the scene of the crime are usually a mixture of the perpetrator’s and of the victim’s. When this happens, it is impossible to identify the correct blood type of the perpetrator — this makes it easy to identify the wrong person.
Since the 1990s, organizations like the [Innocence Project](http://www.innocenceproject.org/) have been fighting to exonerate the wrongfully accused. However, this usually occurs over a decade after the person is wrongfully convicted, and sometimes comes too late, taking these men and women’s lives. Convictions like this are a serious matter and must be taken into consideration before serious sentences based on weak evidence are issued. After all, what if today was the day you were exonerated after serving 25 years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit?
