Poorly trained police. Underpaid defense attorneys. No support for the wrongly convicted. How did the state’s criminal justice system fail so profoundly?
By Lara Bazelon
In 1991, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office indicted a 20-year-old black man named Anthony Wright on a charge of capital murder. The alleged crime was heinous. A 77-year-old woman had been robbed in her home, then raped and stabbed to death. The case against Wright turned, in part, on a confession written by the police, which Wright had signed. Wright maintained from the beginning that he signed the document only after interrogating officers threatened to “poke his eye out” and “skull fuck” him. He was convicted. After the jury deadlocked 7–5 in favor of a death sentence—in Pennsylvania, death penalty verdicts must be unanimous—Wright was sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole.
In 2005, Wright’s case caught the attention of Innocence Project lawyers Nina Morrison and Peter Neufeld—Morrison, in particular, was suspicious of the claims by the interrogating officers that Wright confessed within minutes of being questioned without any kind of coercion on their part. After years of legal wrangling with the district attorney’s office, they succeeded in getting DNA testing of the rape kit in 2013. The tests showed the rapist’s sperm matched the DNA of a now-deceased crack addict named Ronnie Byrd, who was known to hang around the victim’s block.
I learned about Wright’s case while researching the retrograde criminal justice practices that flourish in Pennsylvania, which ranks eighth in a list of the highest number of exonerations per state kept by the National Registry of Exonerations. Although Pennsylvania is purple trending blue, voting twice for Barack Obama and electing Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in 2014, it has made little progress when it comes to reforming its criminal justice system, in stark contrast to places such as North Carolina, which shares Pennsylvania’s swing-state profile, and Texas, which is blood-red but far more progressive when it comes to passing laws to curtail practices that contribute to the conviction of innocent people.
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