At the time of writing the book, Actual Innocence, in August 1999, the Innocence Project had helped to free thirty-seven wrongly convicted people, including several who had been sentenced to death. In 1987 in Oklahoma, Robert Miller, a regular drug user, suggested to the police that he had some kind of psychic link to a murderer who had raped and killed a number of elderly women. Miller was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. In 1991 and 1993, DNA tests proved that Miller could not have been the rapist. Despite this and the fact that another man had been arrested and convicted of almost identical rapes in the same neighborhood, Miller was not freed until 1998.
Many people consider a confession to be the strongest kind of evidence of guilt.
White Coat Fraud Fred Zain was frequently called as an expert witness by the state to testify that blood and semen evidence matched that of accused persons. In 1993, an investigation showed that Zain did no tests on some evidence and could not have reached the conclusions he testified to based on the tests he did carry out. By this time Zain had moved from West Virginia and was continuing his work in Texas, a death penalty state. Evidence suggests that Zain s is not an isolated case. Expert evidence is often given special weight by juries who have no way of knowing exactly what the expert s qualifications are.