New York Fails to Pass Criminal Justice Reforms

07.08.13

New York Fails to Pass Criminal Justice Reforms

Criminal justice reform legislation that would reduce the rate of wrongful convictions languished in the New York State Legislature last month.

 

Despite support from Governor Cuomo to videotape criminal interrogations and improve eyewitness identification procedures, measures that have been adopted in many other states, the legislative session ended without adopting these recommendations. The Rochester

Democrat and Chronicle

reports:


“It’s frustrating after so much progress has been made to come away with nothing,” said Innocence Project Policy Director Stephen Saloom. “New York has a wrongful conviction problem that is worse than about any other state in the country.”

 

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“We are going to keep talking with everybody involved,” Saloom said. “There’s just increasing agreement that we should not be relying on … unreliable evidence in our criminal justice system.”

While the governor publicly proposed criminal justice reforms in his State of the State address earlier this year, the opposition he received from the District Attorney’s Association and the police forced him to stall.


Saloom said he is hopeful that the disagreements can be ironed out in the next session.

 

“The governor would love to have this happen but he also wants all the interested stakeholders to come to an agreement,” he said.

New York State has the third highest rate of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence.

 

Read the

full article

.

 

Read more

about the New York reforms

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