David A. Harris: Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science

Abstract

David A. Harris: Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science New York: New York University Press, 2012. pp. x, 260. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 978-0- Simon A. Cole As Failed Evidence went to press, more than 250 convicted criminals had been exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing since 1989 in the United States (there are now more than 300). As David A. Harris notes, these exonerations showed that wrongful convictions were more common than most in the U.S. criminal justice system had imagined, and they convinced many within the system and in the general public that the American criminal justice system had a wrongful conviction problem. This realization led to inquiries into the contributors to this problem, and these inquiries pointed to a number of factors, including eyewitness identification, confession evidence, forensic evidence, informant evidence, poor defense lawyering, and police and prosecutorial misconduct. This list included some of the most trusted forms of evidence used in the American criminal justice system. These findings have led to calls for the reform of the criminal justice system and its component parts: changing lineup procedures, recording interrogations, improving forensic science, better funding indigent defense counsel, tightening prosecutorial ethics, better controlling and documenting the use of informants, creating innocence commissions, enhancing the writ of habeas corpus and post-conviction access to the courts, and so on. Some progress has undoubtedly been made, but most scholars concerned about innocence would probably agree that the progress has been insufficient. As Harris notes, the criminal justice system has been distressingly resistant to proposed changes that seem to flow logically from an analysis of the post-conviction exoneration cases. None of this is news: it was discussed more than ten years ago in Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer’s Actual Innocence (2000) More recently, Brandon L. Garrett’s Convicting the Innocent (2011) offered an updated, more thorough, and more scholarly account of the Innocence Project cases. Several other books have discussed this material as well. Given this scholarly landscape, the contribution of Failed Evidence is twofold. First, it offers a book-length treatment focused more narrowly on just three contributors to wrongful conviction: eyewitness identification, false confessions, and forensic evidence. Failed Evidence does not present original research in these areas, but rather a readable summary of existing scholarly research. The more significant contribution comes in the core chapters 3 through 5, where Harris seeks to explain why “law enforcement” has been so resistant to the reforms that innocence scholars have claimed are so obviously necessary. This is a topic that has received less attention in the innocence literature. Harris’s emphasis is on “law enforcement”—police and prosecutors—rather than other actors in the criminal justice system, such as judges, jurors, defense lawyers, forensic scientists, or legislators, because, Harris argues, police and prosecutors are the key actors with the most power to truly effect change. S.A. Cole Department of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7080, USA e-mail: scole@uci.edu