Published: 07 February 2016
2015 saw the greatest increase in general awareness of wrongful convictions in recent memory. You can read the attached article by the National Registry of Exonerations for how this furthers our understanding of the changing landscape.
But I think 2015 is the year of something much bigger. 2015 was the year of the body and dash cams. Add to that the steady proliferation of videocams now in everyone's phones. Together they may do more to prevent wrongful convictions than we will ever know. We won't be able to count the times a prosecutor, who may have pursued a case otherwise, chooses not to because she\he can see what actually happened and who actually did the crime.
Having said that, there will still be those prosecutors with a "win at all cost" mentality, who will continue to unscrupulously find ways to explain away the evidence. A common tactic today is one is that when DNA is analyzed and does not belong to the convicted person, prosecutors create wild scenarios introducing the idea of there being two perpetrators. Never mind that it is an entirely different scenario than the one they presented to convict the person! These prosecutors present this without embarrassment, without any sign of having reevaluated their original conclusions because the DNA excludes the person. It is hard to believe how they can explain away a video recording, but I'm sure they will come up with something.
