This lecture was the first I've ever heard from a convict (and I use the term technically) eventually exonerated by DNA evidence. It was superb. Johnson is a charismatic speaker, and put together a beautifully paced lecture that covered his case, his prison years, his retrial, and its aftermath.

At least for me, the notion of a wrongly convicted man being cleared by DNA evidence usually conjures up this image of a rigged case where the prosecutor bribes some other convicts with deals if they testify against the accused. Or a Shawshank Redemption-esque coincidence where Johnson happened to be at or near the scene of the crime, and discovered in some way that made it appear as if he been the culprit. Contrary to this notion, Johnson's case serves more as a reminder that the justice system needs no such dramatics to fail miserably.

For example, in Johnson's case, the victim failed to identify him. There were no witnesses who testified that Johnson had confessed to them. There was no circumstantial evidence. In fact, the only evidence they had actually cast doubt on Johnson's culpability: hair samples taken from the victim did not match Johnson's.

Odder still was the fact that Johnson was actually tried for two rapes sequentially. The police believed that the same rapist committed two separate rapes, and Johnson was their suspect. However, the rapes occurred in different jurisdictions, so Johnson had two trials: one for each. In the first trial, there was an all-white jury, and Johnson was convicted. In the second, it was mixed ethnicity, and he was acquitted.

Not that I would invite anyone, from solely this, to draw the conclusion that twelve white people in Georgia might convict an innocent black person on scant or even contradicting evidence. Especially if said black person happened to have a prior arrest record. I would never suggest that.

Of course the other option is that they're just mentally retarded, and Georgia code doesn't require jurors to be capable of forming complete thoughts. But that would also be inappropriate to suggest, so I shall refrain from suggesting anything.

Johnson spent sixteen years in jail, and when he was finally exonerated, the state of Georgia paid him $500,000 in compensatory damages. That's approximately thirty-thousand dollars a year. I'm not sure how they arrived at that figure, and I'm not prepared to speculate as to what someone's freedom is worth per year. But for juxtaposition, I will point out that in the famous case of Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, the plaintiff received $640,000 in damages for spilling coffee on her own self.

So just to be clear: if McDonald's were to have gone out to that woman's car, abducted her, printed that she was a rapist in their circular, kept her in the back of the Ronald McDonald House in forced confinement for sixteen years, then released her, our government would have thought it $140,000 less damaging to her life than serving hot coffee in a poorly designed container.

But I digress.

The more important takeaway from this lecture, I think, is that while things like the Innocence Project and other valuable organizations are worth supporting and serve to alleviate the problems with our judicial system after the fact, the truth of the matter is that there are fundamental flaws in the way we process criminal cases that we need to fix.

Listening to Johnson describe his case lead me to think seriously about something I had not considered before: although our criminal justice system purports to be based on an "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy, the mere fact that only one person is on trial for a crime belies that. There's no way you can arrest someone, keep them in custody, march them into a courtroom, seat them by themselves in a box for "the defendant", and then claim that you are not assuming they are at least likely to be guilty.

Johnson pointed out that in both his trials, the prosecution employed the standard TV drama gesture of asking the victim on the stand if "the rapist is in this courtroom", and "could you identify him", with the victim naturally pointing to Johnson. But at least in the first trial, the police report clearly stated that when the victim was originally asked to pick the man who raped her from a lineup, she did not pick Johnson. So even when it is abundantly clear that the victim is not capable of providing useful testimony as to the identity of her assailant, this sort of thing skates.

As Survivor-like as it may sound, I do truly wonder if the police should be made to go through their narrowing process in front of the jury, rather than having the case be presented once they decide on a single suspect. If, for example, the jury had been there to witness the victim picking another person from the lineup, surely they would have been much less likely to convict Johnson of the crime! Yet that emotional impact is lost, buried in the police report, and the presentation of her positively identifying him in the courtroom is the only vision with which they are left.

I will conclude now before I recount the entire lecture, which I am fast in danger of doing. Needless to say, I highly recommend a listen, and if you are feeling supportive, you can also order a copy of Johnson's recent book on the subject.

Links: http://forum-network.org/lecture/dna-and-exit-freedom

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