Justin Brooks
Professor, California Western School of Law; Director,
California Innocence Project |
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Cheah Wui Ling
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore
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Daniel Ehighalua
Nigerian Barrister; Project Director, Innocence Project Nigeria
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C Ronald Huff
Professor of Criminology, Law & Society and Sociology, University of California-Irvine
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Phil Locke
Science and Technology Advisor, Ohio Innocence Project and Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic
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Dr. Carole McCartney
Reader in Law, Faculty of Business and Law, Northumbria University
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Nancy Petro
Author and Advocate
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Kana Sasakura
Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Konan University; Visiting Scholar, University of Washington School of Law; Innocence Project Northwest (IPNW)
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Dr. Robert Schehr
Professor, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Northern Arizona University; Executive Director, Arizona Innocence Project
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Shiyuan Huang
Associate Professor, Shandong University Law School; Visiting Scholar, University of Cincinnati College of Law
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Ulf Stridbeck
Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, Norway
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Martin Yant
Author and Private Investigator
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The play My Kind of Town, about police torture and wrongful conviction, opens in Chicago
I was disturbed by the judgmental tone of Alexander Baron’s analysis of the National Registry of Exonerations. He seems to attribute epidemic of fabricated child sexual abuse allegations to “loony feminists,” which in my experience is rarely the case.
Baron goes on to argue that Cathleen Crowell, who as a confused teenager falsely accused Gary Dotson of rape, should have been prosecuted for her act. Baron ignores the fact that it was only because Crowell came forward — an courageious act for which she was subjected to much ridicule — to admit her lie that Dotson ever had a chance to be cleared. Even worse, Baron reports with apparent satisfaction that Crowell “was held to account to a higher power” when she died of breast cancer in 2008.
The most important thing I take away from the evidence presented in the National Registry of Exonerations is that we should always be careful about rushing to judgment in mean-spirited abandon without all the facts. Baron apparently missed the lesson.