And in Texas, A.B. Butler received a pardon from Governor Bush after spending the last 7 of his 16 years in prison fighting to get the tests that cleared him of kidnapping and rape. These cases stand for more than the importance of DNA evidence. 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.