October 2 was the 10th annual Wrongful Conviction Day. In the United States, it’s estimated that between 1 and 6 percent of people serving time in prison are innocent.
The Montana Innocence Project provides free legal representation to Montanans who have been wrongly convicted. Since 2008 they’ve helped free 10 people. MTPR’s Maxine Speier spoke with Amy Sings In The Timber, the executive director of the Montana Innocence Project.
Maxine Speier: Amy, can you start by telling me how big of an impact wrongful convictions have in Montana?
Amy Sings In The Timber: I mean, if there's even one wrongful conviction, it's a tremendous impact. It impacts not only the individual but their family and their communities and quite honestly, it impacts our society as a state and as a nation. When we are locking somebody up who is innocent of a crime, then we are in effect missing them from the fabric of our society.
Speier: Why do wrongful convictions happen?
Sings In The Timber: Well, there's a number of drivers behind wrongful convictions. You know, some of them are mistakes, quite honestly. The criminal legal system is run by humans. Humans are fallible and so that means that there's margin for error. What we know is that there are certain things that we can do to ensure that that margin of error is as minimal as possible and improvements that we can make to ensure that. There are things like eyewitness misidentification — which is a pretty significant factor in wrongful convictions — that we know certain best practices can help to eliminate.
Speier: As part of Wrongful Conviction Day, three of the Montana Innocence Project’s clients are sharing their stories at a community event in Missoula. Combined, these three people have already spent more than half a century serving time for crimes where witnesses later recanted testimony or a new science for DNA evidence came to light. But only one of the three has been exonerated. Why are wrongful convictions so difficult to overturn?
Sings In The Timber: So there's a number of different elements at play here. One is that the system is set up to follow some procedures and sets of rules, and part of those procedures and sets of rules really say, if you haven't had some evidence to bring to light during your original trial, and you can only bring certain things that were argued at an original trial up on direct appeals, then trying to find new evidence of actual innocence that is admissible is the first big hurdle as far as the burden being on our clients to prove their innocence.
Leading up, the burden is supposed to be on the state to put somebody away. And I would argue that while that may in fact be the way that it's supposed to be, it oftentimes doesn't play out that way in the original proceedings. And so to think that, once you're in a post-conviction arena, the cards are gonna be 10 times stacked as far as having the burden of coming up with the new evidence of actual innocence and then finding the proper procedural ways to go about bringing that information to light.
Speier: In this work do you find moments of joy or hope? And what does that look like?
Sings In The Timber: We absolutely find moments and hope and, you know, as we're talking about, in particular, the three clients that will be joining us. You know, only one of the three of them has been exonerated and even that is a precarious situation yet. But each one of them has succeeded in, in smaller victories. Every one of them is free at this point and whether that's on parole or whether that is in their pending process for full exoneration, those in and of themselves are huge victories. They've been able to be reunited with family, they've been able to pursue life again in really meaningful ways. Of course, an exoneration is a huge, huge moment of joy.
What I will say is that's oftentimes just the beginning, too. Once somebody is exonerated, rebuilding a life is tremendously hard work and it's, of course, ups and downs just like everybody's life is, but in some ways much, much steeper challenges. And we have to embrace those victories, small and large, in order to be able to keep doing the work that we're doing.
