210: Perfect Evidence
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This is how far it's gone. In his office at a place called the Innocence Project in New York, Hui Dao stands amidst piles of letters and legal documents. I'm not really sure how to describe it. At some points the piles are actually as tall as I am and I'm six feet tall. It might be funny if it weren't so sobering at the same time. Just outside the door of his office are four stacks of letters that go waist high. We estimate there's 2,000 letters here that have only been logged in and not even looked at. The volume of mail has grown exponentially. If you had come here two years ago, there would have been two weeks worth of mail and now there's 11 months worth. All these letters, from prisoners of hope that DNA evidence will set them free. Those are the only cases that the Innocence Project takes on. But after they're done screening the letters and choosing the best cases and sending the prisoners to get their DNA tested, half the time the test proves the prisoner was guilty. Which when you think about it, the prisoner knew how long. How far is it gone? How much of things change because of DNA evidence? The largest and oldest private DNA forensics lab in the country, cell marked diagnostics in Germantown, Maryland, still tests for murder and sexual assault cases. Now the fastest growing part of their business is old unsolved cases. They test evidence for over 500 of these a month. Lab Director Charlotte Word says they're also doing robberies, assaults, criminal paternity suits, private eye work, insurance fraud, medical malpractice. Well, there've been cases where individuals were told they had cancer, they went in and had an organ or tissue or something removed. And then when the pathologist did the review of those tissue samples, no form of cancer was identified. So the question was, in the original slide that was looked at, was there a mistake that this slide really belongs to someone else who truly has cancer? A person who actually has cancer but doesn't know it because the slides got switched. That's correct. How far is it gone? Even medium-sized cities like Arlington, Texas, population 350,000, are going back through all their old unsolved homicides to see if there's evidence with usable DNA. I found it very interesting to go through some of these large casebooks or three-ring binders full of yellowed investigative notes from decades gone by. Detective John Stanton says that one case he stumbled upon was one that he had worked on himself on his first day on the job as a crime scene officer. On Valentine's Day, 1985, the grizzly murder of a young woman. Back then, we had a cigarette butt in that case, believe it or not. And of course back then, you know, just how definitive a piece of evidence this is going to be, it's probably not. There's probably a lot of people who smoked this brand of cigarette. Nearly 20 years later, he opened the evidence bag that he'd sealed back in 1985. And the DNA and the saliva on the cigarette butt was perfectly preserved. Matching it with the DNA profile in a database is probably the only hope of ever solving this murder. There are ever 1,266,000 DNA profiles of criminals in government databases, but that number is climbing fast as more states gear up the programs. 1,300 criminals are matched to crimes every year by the FBI through their DNA. So that case may rest very strongly on that little cigarette butt. How far is it gone? Here in Illinois, there have been more wrongful convictions overturned with DNA evidence than anywhere in the country. 18. Enough people wrongly sentenced to death that a Republican governor put a moratorium on the death penalty and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row in the state. 167 people. Maurice Posley has written a number of investigative stories about wrongful convictions for the Chicago Tribune. And he says that one of the most important things about DNA evidence is that by overturning these convictions, it's giving us a window into some disturbing police procedures. How they get innocent people to confess to crimes they did not commit, how they get witnesses to lie, and paying crimes on innocent people. People said these things happened before, these are not new accusations, but now we can make those, people can make those with a new certainty. This is not guesswork in these cases. The newest thing that's happening, he says, is that even in cases where there's no DNA evidence,
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