The vast majority of folks who get cleared based on “new DNA evidence” or whatever actually don’t have their innocence proven. Instead in most of these cases, there is shown to be some problem with a piece of evidence relied on at trial.
To be clear, the prosecutors should be held to a high standard, and they should be forced to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. But we should also be a little more cautious about proclaiming the “innocence” of people whose guilty convictions are found to be problematic. In case that evidence had been excluded on time, it is possible that the prosecutors could still have built a solid case that relied on different evidence.
> about proclaiming the “innocence” of people whose guilty convictions are found to be problematic
That's literally how innocence works though. From the universal declaration of human rights: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial ...". If they weren't proven guilty they are presumed innocent.
Yes but it’s a presumption rather than something that is proven.
If the guy who done it was blonde, 6’2”, driving a red Mercedes, and he wrapped the body in a green rug, and it turns out that the bloodstains on green rug of the 6’2” blonde guy with the red Mercedes that you arrested for it are only actually 70% likely to be the victim’s rather than 99.5%, while LEGALLY the guy in prison now can benefit from the presumption of innocence, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable if he moved in downstairs.
Proven innocence would be “oh we have irrefutable video evidence that this guy was two states away at the time”.
This seems like a stretch. As far as I know, usually DNA evidence in exonerations is more along the lines of, "The DNA is 98% match for a known killer who was arrested for similar crime a few years later."
Even that is problematic. A 98% match means there’s a 1 in 50 chance that the sample is not from the person that it’s been matched to. How many cases do you have to cross match with how many felons before you get a false positive? It’s probably not as many as you think, but I don’t have the numbers to do the maths with.
To be clear, the prosecutors should be held to a high standard, and they should be forced to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. But we should also be a little more cautious about proclaiming the “innocence” of people whose guilty convictions are found to be problematic. In case that evidence had been excluded on time, it is possible that the prosecutors could still have built a solid case that relied on different evidence.