Although New Yorker politicians consider themselves the national leader in civil rights, New York still ranks third in the nation for wrongful convictions and New York City has the third-highest number of exonerations nationwide. Each case represents a life derailed: families broken, years stolen, careers destroyed, childhoods lived without a parent. Behind many of these injustices is a familiar culprit: law-enforcement misconduct.
His arrest comes more than two decades after three men, who had been imprisoned for more than 17 years for the crime, were released after advanced DNA techniques showed no link between them and DNA from a vaginal swab of the victim. One of the then-suspects, John Kogut, had given police a confession to the murder that he later recanted.
More than 50 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that the key issue in understanding public attitudes toward the death penalty is "not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if polled, opine that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they would find it to be so in the light of all information presently available." This information, Marshall predicted, "would surely convince average citizens that the death penalty was unwise."
