3 Takeaways From This Week’s ‘Law and Order’ Episode ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ 

Actor and Innocence Project Board Member Tony Goldwyn stars in the latest Law & Order episode, which highlights wrongful conviction.

Eyewitness misidentification contributes to an overwhelming majority of convictions overturned by DNA evidence.

In the episode, Mr. Bryant was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and served 12 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Mr. Bryant, who was Black, was wrongly identified as the attacker by the victim’s father, who is white. Later in the episode, the person who stabbed Mr. Bryant is identified by an eyewitness who didn’t get a good look at the perpetrator’s face and is only able to remember a “shiny green jacket” and a “New York Islanders hat.” 

Eyewitness misidentification, as portrayed in the episode, is common in wrongful conviction cases. Eyewitness identifications are not always reliable because memory is malleable and identifications can be heavily influenced by law enforcement procedures in, for example, the administration of lineups and photo arrays.  

As seen in the case of Mr. Bryant’s wrongful conviction, cross-racial identification is particularly unreliable. Data shows that people are more likely to misidentify a person of a different race, and white people are particularly bad at distinguishing between people of color.

Wrongful convictions disproportionately impact Black people. 

The wrongful conviction of Mr. Bryant, who was Black, reflects a disturbing reality —  Black and brown communities bear a disproportionate burden within the criminal legal system. Nearly 60% of the people that the Innocence Project has helped to free or exonerate since 1992 are Black.  And more than half of the 3,300 people who were exonerated in the U.S. between 1989 and 2022 are Black, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. This is despite the fact that Black people account for just 13.6% of the U.S. population. A 2022 report from the registry further found that innocent Black people were seven times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than innocent white people.

Prosecutors can play a critical role in revealing, reversing, and preventing wrongful convictions.

In last night’s episode, the Manhattan Post-Conviction Justice Unit confirmed Mr. Bryant’s innocence through post-conviction DNA testing. 

When led by a district attorney who commits to appropriate staffing, resources and best practices, a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) can help restore justice for wrongly convicted people and strengthen accountability in the criminal legal system. Indeed, at least 30 of the Innocence Project’s 250 victories involved a CIU. They include the case of Renay Lynch, whose exoneration of a 1995 murder was secured by the Innocence Project, co-counsel Fisher & Byrialsen, PLLC, and the Erie County District Attorney’s CIU.   

When the show’s Assistant District Attorney Price begins to have doubts that Mr. Palmer is the attacker in Mr. Bryant’s murder, he drops the charges against Mr. Palmer with District Attorney Baxter’s full support. Both officials reflect on the responsibility of prosecutors to prevent wrongful convictions, which they say are “anathema to the criminal justice system, and to the human spirit. ” After they drop the case against Mr. Palmer, further investigation reveals the person who actually murdered Mr. Bryant. By refusing to go forward with a questionable case, the fictional Assistant District Attorney Price highlights the need for law enforcement and prosecutors to explore all avenues of evidence to prevent potentially convicting the wrong person for a crime.