Baltimore County police have started testing a backlog of evidence from rape cold cases. Ten of 49 cases processed so far have yielded actionable DNA profiles. In at least one case, the answers came too late.
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How many times was Justice Antonin Scalia wrong about Henry Lee McCollum and the death penalty?
The cumulative effect of Convicting the Innocent is stunning. Almost all of the 250 DNA exonerations occurred in murder or rape cases. Murder and rape amounts to less than 1% of all felony convictions. The errors typically flowed not from malicious motives but from the normal cognitive biases that lead detectives and prosecutors to be convinced that they have the right person. The result must be thousands of erroneous guilty pleas and trial convictions each year.
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