John R. Lott Jr. defends the death penalty partially on the grounds that “DNA evidence has improved its accuracy in trials over the past couple of decades, as it has become more commonly used.” Balko counters that “it’s a mistake to look at DNA testing as a panacea”:
[DNA testing] isn’t relevant in the vast majority of criminal cases, so we can’t rely on it to catch our mistakes. It’s really more of a wake-up call. Death penalty supporters who say we can just sit back and rely on DNA testing to save us are putting forth a dangerous proposition. At some point, we’ll either have found all of the wrongful convictions that can be exposed by DNA testing, or the remaining wrongly convicted in those cases will all have died. From that point forward, we won’t hear about exonorations nearly as often. DNA testing will go a long way toward preventing wrongful convictions, but — and this is important — only in the small set of cases for which DNA testing is dispositive.
Here’s the scary part: If we haven’t fixed the problems with the criminal justice system by then, we’ll continue to have the same rate of wrongful convictions in non-DNA cases that we have today. But at that point, we’ll be much more likely to plod along with a false sense of confidence, because we’ll no longer have a transcendent technology to remind us that we sometimes get it wrong.
The Dish 