Supreme Court denies prisoners’ right to DNA evidence

Marches and rallies were held in state capitals and other cities June 27 to mark the National Day of Action for the Wrongly Convicted. Organizers of the actions, including families whose loved ones were put to death or died in prison, said that up to 10 percent of the 2.3 million-strong U.S. prison population may be wrongfully convicted.

“It can happen to anybody,” Walter Swift told protesters outside the Michigan capitol in Lansing. Swift, a Black man from Detroit, was convicted of rape in 1982 and sentenced to 55 years in prison. He was exonerated and released last year after DNA testing proved his innocence. (Lansing State Journal, June 28)

The protests came just nine days after a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a lower court ruling in the case of William Osborne, an Alaska prisoner who had argued for and won his right to DNA testing in a 1994 sexual assault case. Osborne had offered to pay for the test himself.

In denying prisoners’ rights to DNA testing, the Supreme Court’s far-right majority, led by George W. Bush-appointee Chief Justice John Roberts, claimed that “to suddenly constitutionalize this area would short-circuit what looks to be a prompt and considered legislative response” by the individual states.

Alaska is one of three states that still have no laws on the books giving prisoners access to genetic evidence. However, many states that have such laws also severely limit prisoners’ rights to testing, including time limits and no access for those who admitted guilt under coercion or for plea bargains.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissenting opinion, noted, “The DNA test Osborne seeks is a simple one, its cost modest, and its results uniquely precise. Yet for reasons the State has been unable or unwilling to articulate, it refuses to allow Osborne to test the evidence at his own expense and to thereby ascertain the truth once and for all.”

Osborne was represented by attorney Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project, the group that helped Swift win his freedom. Since 1989, some 240 prisoners have been exonerated because of DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project.

Seventeen people sentenced to death row have been freed so far because DNA testing proved their innocence. Since the resumption of the death penalty in 1976, 133 prisoners facing execution have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Daniel Wade Moore of Alabama was the most recent in May. About half of exonerated death-row prisoners had made confessions under police coercion.

DNA testing is no gift from on-high provided by the government, courts or police. Kirk Bloodsworth, the first death-row prisoner exonerated by modern DNA evidence, learned about the process accidentally while reading a book in a prison library. (Mountain Echo, Feb. 13, 2008)

The Supreme Court’s attack on DNA testing was the latest indication that the capitalist state is continuing its relentless attack on the hard-won rights of working class and oppressed people despite the shift in power from Republicans to Democrats.

It appears, in fact, that the court is grinding ahead with a right-wing urgency driven by the sea-change in mass political consciousness indicated by last year’s election of first African-American President Barack Obama and by the deepening economic crisis of the profit system, which may point to stormy class struggles ahead.

On May 27 the Supreme Court made it easier for cops and prosecutors to interrogate suspects who have not received proper legal counsel. Again by a 5-4 vote, the court overturned a 1986 ruling that forbid police from questioning a suspect without an attorney present if the person requested one. This is a basic right that every person in the country is acquainted with, thanks to innumerable TV police shows and movies.

On April 6 the court refused to consider the appeal of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a world-renowned political prisoner on death row in Pennsylvania. And on June 15 the court indicated it would not consider the appeal of the Cuban 5 political prisoners during its next session.

Supporters of wrongfully convicted Troy Davis, a prisoner on Georgia’s death row, were awaiting word if the court would take up Davis’ appeal on June 29 or 30–the last two days of this term.

The U.S. Supreme Court, with its unelected, appointed-for-life status, is the wing of the capitalist state charged with regulating the degree of repression according to the needs of the ruling class. The good news is that even a reactionary court can be forced to grant concessions when confronted with a militant people’s movement. Building this kind of fightback movement is the most urgent need of poor and working people today.