The appellate courts that overturned these convictions referred to the trials with language like unforgivable, intolerable, beyond reprehension, illegal, improper and dishonest. The thought that it is even possible for prosecutors to withhold evidence, allow a witness to lie, or destroy a witness's credibility through the innuendo of false allegations during examination raises a significant reasonable doubt regarding the integrity and truthfulness of our judicial process. There is still another half to this argument. These 32 wrongly accused people were convicted based upon eyewitness testimony. Some had even confessed to their own guilt and culpability but were discovered to be innocent as a result of DNA evidence.
Eyewitness testimony is held in high regard by both judges and juries.
However, eyewitness testimony may be emotional. Eyewitness testimony may be presented with the personal conviction of truth and may even include specific facts about what transpired, but quite often eyewitness testimony is proven wrong when DNA testing is introduced as contradictory evidence. Of the two, DNA evidence is objective, based upon objective scientific facts, and therefore prevails over the emotional eyewitness testimony. There is still more evidence to attest to the fallibility of our judicial system. It is ironic that law schools and journalism schools have often times been the source of discovering an error in the conviction of an innocent person.