I. Curtailing Gun Research and Limiting Restrictions on Gun Permits
In 1996, Congress amended an appropriations bill to the effect that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control." Additionally, in 2011 Congress imposed similar restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) research, after a study funded by the N.I.H. showed that, on average, "guns did not protect those who purchased them from being shot in an assault." [1]
In 2007, Missouri eliminated a decades-old system under which every handgun buyer had to obtain a permit and undergo a background check. Researchers at John Hopkins University found that the firearms homicide rate increased by thirty-four percent in the first year after the repeal and remained significantly higher than it had been, while the rate of homicides committed with other weapons did not change.
II. Updating Factors in Wrongful Convictions
The most common factor in wrongful convictions is mistaken eyewitness identification. Following behind in order of frequency are the involvement of scientific fraud or junk science; suppression of evidence by police or prosecutors; and false confessions. This most recent rendering of wrongful conviction factors gives much more weight to scientific manipulation and suppression of evidence than previous studies have shown. "With the exception of DNA evidence (which emerged from biology, not criminology). forensic tests are laughably unscientific, no independent entity exists to establish that such tests are reliable before their results are admissible as evidence." [2]
Fingerprint evidence was once thought to be the gold standard of forensic evidence; however, when a test was given to a gathering of fingerprint identification experts, they differed significantly in the conclusions reached. These experts don't agree on the number of points of agreement that must be present to make a positive identification. Hair evidence, which has been the single most important factor in convicting many people of serious crimes, is considered to be so unreliable that some legal jurisdictions ban its use in trials. More recently, ballistics evidence has come under scrutiny, because bullets fired from the same gun don't all bear the same conclusive markings.
There have been several notable cases in which lab technicians had been deliberately falsifying evidence for years before being found out. Even the FBI's forensics laboratory came under withering fire after the whistleblower, Dr. Whitehorse, who worked in the lab for years, cited instances of evidence being doctored to fit a prosecutor's theory of a case.
III. Some Good News for Incarcerated Juveniles
In January of this year, President Obama announced a ban on the practice of holding juvenile inmates in solitary confinement. He also will expand treatment for the mentally ill and increase the amount of time that inmates in solitary confinement spend outside their cells. His order, overall, is expected to affect about 10,000 inmates in federal prisons. The administration hopes that state prison officials will follow suit.
Research suggests that solitary confinement has the potential to lead to devastating, lasting psychological consequences. It has been linked to depression, alienation, withdrawal, a reduced ability to interact with others, and the potential for violent crime.
The second good news for juvenile inmates also came in January, when the U.S. Supreme Court strengthened a previous ruling that banned life without parole sentences for juveniles. The Court declared that the ban should be applied retroactively, meaning that more than 2,000 prisoners who are doing time in prison with no possibility of ever coming up for parole now have at least have a chance of winning release some day. [3]
Footnotes
[1] Margaret Talbot, "Obama's Gun Gambit," The New Yorker, January 18, 2016.
[2] Kathryn Schulz, "Dead Certainty," The New Yorker, January 25, 2016.
[3] Diane Dimond, "Changes bring some justice for juveniles," The Albuquerque Journal, January 30. 2016.
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