o Amnesty International, the average salary of court appointed lawyers was $11.70 per hour. The 1996 National Institute of Justice also cites inadequate counsel, specifically in failing to consult competent scientific experts, as a contributing factor to the dilemma of individuals being false sentenced to Death Row. Whitehead 6 According to the National Institute of Justice, prior to the advent of DNA typing courts were forced to rely on less reliable types of evidence such as blood typing and eyewitness accounts. Blood typing, it is reported by the National Institute of Justice, has oftentimes yielded completely erroneous results. This logically indicates the possibility that individuals may have been erroneously convicted based upon this evidence. According to the National Institute of Justice 1996 report, courts relying solely upon eyewitness accounts wrongly convicted individuals in 28 documented cases. DNA evidence later cleared these individuals. In this report, Supreme Court Justice Brennen in the United States vs. Wade, 12 was quoted as saying that "The vagaries of eyewitness identification are well known; the annals of criminal law are rife with instances of mistaken identification." Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a noted critic of the reliability of eyewitness testimony noted that witnesses are susceptible to intentional or unintentional suggestions from police. She explains that there is pressure on the part of witnesses to see the crime solved. This susceptibility may contribute to false eyewitness identifications. In assessing physical evidence, the National Institute of Justice indicated that the common practice of blood typing, as the primary source of indicating guilt, is faulty in its unreliability. The deterioration of the genetic material in blood typing procedures could yield completely erroneous results. This logically implicates the possibility that individuals may have been erroneously convicted based upon this form of evi...
