From the Salt Lake Tribune:
Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Daniel S. Medwed began his practice in tax, trust and estates.
“I knew I was in trouble when my girlfriend — now wife — asked me what I did during the day. I couldn’t remember,” said Medwed, now a professor at the University of Utah’s College of Law. “I knew then I had to go into criminal law. Even today she introduces me as a recovering tax lawyer.”
Since then, Medwed has blazed a unique trail in the field of criminal defense law. He’s a board member of directors for the Innocence Network and the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center. In 2008, the 43-year-old native of Cambridge, Mass., helped draft and pass a factual innocence bill for the state of Utah, which created a procedure for prisoners to prove their innocence even without DNA evidence. The law also allowed compensation for wrongfully-convicted inmates who subsequently proved their innocence.
Medwed’s new book, Prosecution Complex, published by New York University Press, works from the maxim of 18th-century English judge and jurist William Blackstone that, “It’s better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.” Medwed’s intent is to show where the nation’s criminal justice system has gone wrong, and how we can get it right, his exploration set against the contemporary backdrop in which United States prisons hold more people than were housed in Stalin’s gulags.
Since the dawn of DNA testing in 1989, more than 250 inmates have been exonerated, with New York-based Innocence Project helping to exonerate 154. But as Medwed’s book reveals, there’s no sure way to determine ….continue reading here….
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