They reveal how the search for the guilty can go wrong. What matters most is not how these people got out of prison, but how they got in. We know eyewitnesses sometimes make mistakes. Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated.
Racism trumps the truth.
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.