Point of View

The Innocence Project (innocenceproject.org) recently announced it had helped clear another man wrongly convicted of raping, robbing, assaulting, and kidnapping a Chicago office worker in 1982. Using DNA tests, the group determined that Jerry Miller's genetic makeup was different than the rapist—after Miller had spent 24 years behind bars.

That makes 200 individuals who have been set free as a result of the work of this group that takes advantage of improved DNA testing technology and a drive to insure the guilt of those who are imprisoned.

Of the 200 individuals cleared, 120 are black. The overturned cases most often were sex crimes where DNA evidence is more often available.

According to a USA Today report, most cases that were overturned were from the 1980s and 1990s, before DNA testing was available or widely used. Yet evidence from these cases had been preserved.

The good news is that an innocent man's freedom is secured. The bad news is that the wrong person was convicted and that more than likely the guilty person remains free.

While the number of individuals wrongly convicted is very small considering the total number of convictions, nonetheless each mistaken incarceration represents a real human being with a family who suffered deeply from a miscarriage of justice.

People are wrongly convicted for a variety of reasons. The now dismissed case against the three Duke University students (and lacrosse players) surfaced the specter of flawed justice in a different way.

In that case, the district attorney made inflammatory and public comments about the case, withheld evidence, and lied to the court and law enforcement officers. There was no credible evidence that a crime had occurred.

Reade Seligmann, one of the accused, said the incident exposed him to a "tragic world of injustice" he never knew existed. Truth be known, this case revealed to the entire nation that justice is not always blind.

The students' families had the financial means to prevail in their fight against this rogue prosecutor, the mainstream media, and the academic elites.

Most such cases never garner klieg lights and headlines. The victims are charged, convicted and jailed without the rest of us having a clue that the case against them is far from "airtight."

The Duke case was unusual; typically it is a person's depressed socioeconomic status and race that lead to a temptation to short-circuit the justice system.

Those with limited means can be at the mercy of prosecutors, and sometimes, a rigged judicial system, both of which have the power to abuse the law and railroad the accused into a conviction. They become victims of the system that is supposed to protect them.

This should disturb every American.

There was a time in our nation's history when such abuse was commonplace, publicly acknowledged, and winked at by the majority. While thankfully that day has passed, Lady Justice occasionally is being assaulted in the backrooms of courthouses.

In Martin Luther King's famed letter from the Birmingham jail, he lamented that in the midst of a "mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice" many in the white faith community said these were "social issues, with which the Gospel has no real concern."

He feared at the time that "organized religion [was] too inextricably bound to the status quo" to work to remedy the plight of non-white Americans. He hoped the church would have the vision to see that racial injustice could only be "rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King warned.

Perhaps we all have grown a little too comfortable and a little too confident that justice is being fairly served and not lazily applied. "Justice for all" requires that no stone be left unturned in determining any person's guilt.

While acknowledging that most major failures of the justice system have been in the past, at no time should a citizen forego his rights because he is of a certain class or color. That was wrong in the 1950s; it is wrong today.

Dwayne Hastings is vice president for print and editorial with the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission in Nashville, Tenn.