The innocence movement — forensic science, DNA exoneration, organizations like the Innocence Project — has produced definitive proof that criminal justice systems not only make errors but make them systematically: the wrongfully convicted are disproportionately poor, Black, and lacking resources for adequate defense. A wrongful conviction is not only a catastrophe for the individual; it is a structural diagnosis — evidence of what the system was optimizing for when it was not optimizing for truth. The appropriate response is not to treat each case as an anomaly but to ask what the pattern reveals.
Juana