In the near future, I plan to reintroduce my package of conviction integrity bills to reduce the number of wrongful convictions in Pennsylvania and address key areas that continue to be a source of injustice in our criminal justice system.

Over ten years ago, the Joint State Government Commission’s Advisory Committee on Wrongful Convictions issued its report and recommendations to address the miscarriages of justice caused by wrongful convictions. The Committee reported that “Since 1989, 34 states and the District of Columbia have been witness to 273 postconviction DNA exonerations. These exonerations represent cases in which the conviction has been indisputably determined to be wrong by continuing advances in the use of DNA science and evidence.” As of 2020, that number had grown to 375. According to data from the Innocence Project, of those 375 exonerations 69% involved mistaken eyewitness identification, 17% involved jailhouse informant testimony, and 28% involved false confession.

These exonerations challenge our long-accepted assumptions in the soundness of certain practices of the criminal justice system and cast doubt on the reliability of eyewitness identifications, confessions, and seemingly commonplaces practices within the adversarial legal system. However, we have the blueprints to correct these shortcomings.