Egger is a professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. His students get course credits for working with IPOT. After IPOT carefully decides which of the many cases it will accept, the students scrutinize the case records and court documents and then interview the suspect, neighbors and witnesses. Occasionally, they use open-records laws or court orders to gain access to old police files.
IPs do the detailed research and detective work the local police, or the suspect’s lawyer, didn’t do correctly the first time, then use the new information to force the DNA testing and/or new trials that would prove innocence.
“The Innocence Project doesn’t free people from prison,” says Craig Watkins, the first Black criminal district attorney for Dallas. “DAs, prosecutors and judges free people from prison.”
“The Innocence Projects’ great contribution,” Watkins adds, “has been to confront and reveal the ongoing flaws in the methods police and prosecutors use to identify perpetrators and find them guilty. And in Texas, the number one problem is faulty eyewitness identification.”
According to the IP, faulty eyewitness testimony is the worst problem everywhere, followed by false confessions, junk science, the use of snitches and informants, poor lawyering and deliberate government misconduct.
As a criminologist, Egger is particularly upset with how police and prosecutors consistently abuse “science,” ignoring strong research proving that eyewitnesses are often wrong. Twenty-five percent of IP’s DNA exonerations involve two mistaken eyewitnesses, and 13 involve three or more. DNA also has proven that innocent people routinely give false confessions.
“On the other hand,” Egger says, “many of the techniques that police claim to be ‘scientific’ have never been validated by the type of double-blind research routinely required in medicine or psychology. Few, if any peer-reviewed studies prove the validity of analyzing patterns of blood spatters or confirm whether police can accurately match a suspect’s dental records to bite marks on a victim.”
