Defense lawyers sleep through trials. Prosecutors and police tell fibs. Never have these flaws been more starkly exposed than in the last decade, when DNA has freed scores of wrongly convicted people and kept thousands of the wrongly accused out of jail. For the most part, the lessons have been ignored. Of all the statistics tallied by the system, not one shows the number of innocent people sent to prison.
Oversight is fundamental for any system in which life or liberty is at stake.
We have mechanisms to investigate plane crashes, deaths in hospitals and collapses of buildings. Only the criminal justice system exempts itself from accountability for its mistakes. Among the bright exceptions to the indifference to accountability is Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, who followed his landmark moratorium on executions with appointment of a commission to find out why 13 men were wrongly sent to death row. New York's governor, George Pataki, has proposed that a committee review all convictions overturned on DNA evidence. Their findings should be used to make it harder for innocent people to wind up in prison.