Mission
The Innocence Project primarily exonerates people for whom DNA evidence is available to be tested or retested. DNA testing is possible in 5 to 10 percent of criminal cases. Other members of the Innocence Network also help to exonerate those in whose cases DNA testing is not possible.
In addition to working on behalf of those who may have been wrongfully convicted of crimes throughout the United States, those working for the Innocence Project perform research and advocacy related to the causes of wrongful convictions.
Some of the Innocence Project's successes have resulted in rescuing innocent people from death row. The successes of the project have fueled American opposition to the death penalty and have likely been a factor in the decision by some American states to institute moratoria on judicial executions.
In the decision of District Attorney's Office v. Osborne (2009), US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts wrote that post-conviction challenge "poses to our criminal justice systems and our traditional notions of finality better left to elected officials than federal judges." In a court opinion, another justice wrote that forensic science has "serious deficiencies". Roberts expressed a fear that post-conviction DNA testing risks "unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice." The law professor Kevin Jon Heller wrote: "It might lead to a reasonably accurate one."
Read more about this topic: Innocence Project
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“Every Age has its own peculiar faith.... Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)