Why Is It So Hard for Wrongfully Convicted Women to Get Justice?

[Novara]

Why Is It So Hard for Wrongfully Convicted Women to Get Justice?

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After three years of pursuing that question, Daniel and Royal have concluded that most innocence projects—including their own legal clinic—are failing to bring justice to wrongly convicted women. They have identified factors that make female clients more difficult to exonerate, and uncovered startling facts that distinguish the cases of wrongly convicted women from those of men. And they have launched a project that could change how the American innocence movement helps these women get justice.

DANIEL AND ROYAL started by digging deep into the exonerations database. Their first insight had to do with DNA evidence—the very breakthrough that launched the innocence movement a quarter century ago. "Women tend not to be convicted of the types of crimes that can be overturned based on the results of DNA testing," Daniel explained. Men perpetrate the overwhelming majority of rapes and murders of strangers. These crimes are much more likely to leave behind DNA evidence that can rule out an innocent suspect, or point to the real rapist or killer.

But when women kill, they usually kill someone close to them. And in most of those cases, DNA isn't relevant. When a woman is suspected of killing her husband or her child, investigators are likely to find her DNA all over the crime scene whether she's guilty or innocent—so DNA testing can do little to exonerate her. Sure enough, 27 percent of the men in the exonerations registry were freed using DNA evidence. The same was true of only 7.6 percent of the women.

Yet many exoneration projects, including the original Innocence Project founded in 1992, only work with convicts who can be absolved through DNA. Because courts consider DNA tests definitive and trustworthy, genetic evidence is often the most effective way to overturn a wrongful conviction. Innocence projects have tended to avoid cases in which the offender knew the victim, because it can be hard to disentangle what happened in a domestic crime. In some cases, Daniel said, "you almost have to look into that person's brain to know what happened." About half the women in the registry went to prison for harming someone in their care.

But reliance on DNA and aversion to domestic cases weren't the only hurdles for wrongly convicted women. In a whopping 63 percent of the women's cases, Daniel and Royal realized, it turned out that there was never a crime to begin with—the death was actually a suicide or an accident. That was true in only 21 percent of the men's cases.

This was a critical discovery. The tools innocence projects rely on are designed to solve crimes. When DNA evidence isn't available, innocence investigators may seek to establish alibis, interview witnesses overlooked by police, undermine mistaken witness identifications, or track down alternative suspects with a history of similar crimes. Attorneys have a much easier time getting a wrongful conviction reopened when they can point to the real culprit.

Yet if a woman is wrongly convicted for an accident that kills her child, there is no crime to solve, no "real killer," and probably no alibi.

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There was one more thing that set exonerated women apart: Daniel and Royal have come to believe that, in many cases in which women were freed because no crime had been committed, sexist stereotypes had been used to conjure up a motive.

"Almost every case has something like this," Daniel told me, recounting one trial in which a prosecutor suggested a mother had killed her son so she could pursue a career in modeling. "That was based on one tiny conversation expressing slight interest in maybe having a nice photo taken," Daniel said. The woman spent years in prison before the real perpetrator came forward.

When Harper, the woman blamed after a serial killer murdered her son, was on trial, the prosecution portrayed her variously as thirsty for revenge on her ex-husband or, pointing out her pursuit of a postgraduate degree, career-obsessed with no time for a child. Her ex-husband testified that Harper considered an abortion when she first became pregnant (which Harper denied). "And that was used to show she was capable of murder," Royal said, noting that the trial—and jury selection—took place in a rural, heavily conservative county in Illinois.

In the case of Kristine Bunch, the prosecutor said he didn't think the blaze burned Bunch badly enough. Wouldn't a mother walk through fire to save her child? He offered evidence that Bunch was a bad mother, telling the jury in his closing argument that she had asked a friend to take custody of Tony, even though the friend had denied this rumor in her testimony. Not to mention the judge's comments about Bunch's pregnancy.

These sorts of narratives have "nothing to do with whether the evidence shows that a person did what they're being accused of," said Andrea Louise Lewis, an attorney who works for Royal and Daniel. "And these women get wrongfully convicted in these cases where nothing happened. Nothing criminal happened at all."


Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/wrongfully-convicted-women-exonerations-innocence-project