Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
From the NY Times:
A 41-year-old man was set to be released from prison this week after his defense said DNA evidence showed he was wrongly convicted of murder and rape 26 years ago and a judge ordered him freed. The man, Anthony Caravella, was found guilty in the 1983 attack and sentenced to life in prison. Mr. Caravella, who is mentally disabled, was 15 at the time. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty for Mr. Caravella, who was accused of raping, strangling and stabbing Ada Cox Jankowski, 58. She was found dead near an elementary school in Miramar, in South Florida. Mr. Caravella confessed to the crime, but his lawyer said the police beat him to coerce the admission.
Of the nearly 250 cases in which the Innocence Projects has freed an innocent person based on DNA evidence, that person had confessed to the crime. Even a confession is nowhere near certainty that the right person is in prison.
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Comments
Ed, I think some important bits are missing from your penultimate sentence...
Posted by: Squiddhartha | October 12, 2009 9:11 AM
Here's something I simply don't get, though it's a tangent from the issue of confessions and death penalties.
This guys was 15 at the time of the crime of which he was accused.
Doesn't that make him a minor?
Was he "tried as an adult"?
This is the part that I don't get (and apologies if it doesn't apply here, because of some quirk of ages and categories in Florida) - what does that mean? Why is it used? Why do we have a category of "minor" at all if you can simply be tried as an adult regardless of your age?
Is it supposed to accomplish something worthwhile and is just shamelessly abused, or is it a rotten concept that should be tossed?
Posted by: Morgan | October 12, 2009 9:31 AM
Posted by: WScott | October 12, 2009 9:37 AM
A mentally disabled 15 year old sentenced to life in prison. Where did this happen? Oh, Florida. Be glad it wasn't Texas where being proven innocent means little.
Posted by: Rodney | October 12, 2009 9:53 AM
@ Squiddhartha
I was scratching my head too, so I looked it up. I think it was supposed to go something like this. Of the nearly 250 cases in which the Innocence Projects has freed an innocent person based on DNA evidence, in about 25% of those cases the person had confessed to the crime.
Posted by: Abby Normal | October 12, 2009 10:27 AM
Torture is apparently endemic in the US.
Posted by: NoAstronomer | October 12, 2009 2:27 PM
I would rephrase that; "Confessions, especially, are no certainty that the right person is in prison". As any student of history, or psychology, can tell you, the less rigorous the evidentiary standards of a judicial system, the more important confessions become. From the counter-reformation to the Witch trials, from the Great Terror to The War on Terror, when the mighty have gotten it in their heads to use people for political ends by criminalizing them they have turned, first and foremost, to confessions because, even if faced with no evidence to back up the claim, people will believe a person who says they did something. And as this case points out, those confessions are often extracted through beatings, deprivation, and all manner of outrages which one can conceive of.
Morgan: The reason is simple; by being "hard on crime" and charging minors as adults, prosecutors get elected to state government. There is no other reason for it. The supposed rise in juvenile crime likely has more to do with better record keeping than any actual increase in violent behavior.
Posted by: Julian | October 12, 2009 3:12 PM
I'm suprized that they are letting him go. After all, he had a fair trial.
/snark
Posted by: jufulu, FCD | October 12, 2009 3:38 PM
jufulu @ 8:
You may call it snark, but Clarence Thomas calls it jurisprudence.
Posted by: Beagledad | October 12, 2009 4:33 PM
thanks abby
25% ?
I wonder what percentage "confessed" to a cellmate?
Posted by: j a higginbotham | October 12, 2009 7:15 PM
In a related, but unreported, story, another prisoner won his right for testing of biological evidence (http://coa.courts.mi.gov/documents/OPINIONS/FINAL/COA/20080501_C273882_37_62O-273882OPN.PDF) and the tests confirmed that the prisoner was indeed the rapist. I am equally pleased at both results (except for the fact that there is an untested rape kit that has delayed - or worse - an unrelated rape trial just so the other conviction could be confirmed), and wish both classes of results received the same publicity from The (occasionally) Innocence Project.
Posted by: Mark | October 12, 2009 9:27 PM
I would have thought that using confessions *at all* violates that constitutional thingo about making people witnesses against themselves.
Posted by: Paul Murray | October 12, 2009 10:29 PM
@12
You have a right to not incriminate yourself, but you can choose not to use that right (similar to choosing not to bear arms) or even to waive that right (I don't think it means they can torture you into a confession if you waive it, though).
Posted by: Emu Sam | October 13, 2009 2:15 AM
@Mark #11:
Serious question: Why?
Isn't the default setting that a conviction is correct (for some value of "correct")? It is the exceptions that are the news and show where the problems lie.
Posted by: Robin Levett | October 13, 2009 5:49 AM
@Mark #11
In a related, but unreported, story, another prisoner won his right for testing of biological evidence . . . and the tests confirmed that the prisoner was indeed the rapist
Doesn't this story seem a bit odd? If he knew he was the guilty party, what in heck persuaded him to claim the right to bring the DNA testers?
The document to which you refer doesn't offer any enlightenment, being (so far as I understand it) merely the ruling that the defendant is indeed entitled to have the DNA testing done.
Posted by: realthog | October 13, 2009 9:00 AM
I guess he was hoping for a fluke. Since he's already been convicted, the DNA test couldn't prove him any guiltier - but if the result, on an off chance, would have come back as a false negative (or even just muddled), he might have had a chance to get an appeal. Since the state pays his legal costs, he had no reason not to file for release of the samples.
Posted by: Phillip IV | October 13, 2009 10:33 AM
The Innocence Project had a number for that too. I believe these are seperate from the 25% of cases where there was a confession. From their web site:
Posted by: Abby Normal | October 13, 2009 11:19 AM
Realthog #15: Maybe he was hoping that the victim had consensual sex days earlier on the same bed linens and there would be biological evidence to muddy the waters in his favor. Maybe he's just a sociopath trying to gum up the system. Or so on...
Which sort of segues to Robin #14: if exceptions are news because they are exceptions, then part of their newsworthiness is their "exceptionalness." But when the only news is the exceptions, or when we only count the hits, then we are left with a skewed appreciation for the full picture. A non-DNA "innocence project" recently released a report that it took only 6 cases out of 4000 reviewed. Not sure what the DNA Innocence Project's rate is, but these kinds of numbers - and especially the numbers of how many of those cases selected that don't result in merely confirming guilt - might be considered newsworthy. And I think that the costs of these programs (manifest in judges forcing cases to trial without DNA results due to delay, for example) is something that rates consideration alongside the occasions when a convicted defendant is exonerated. It is a difficult balance, of course - few things are more important than freeing an innocent prisoner (fewer still if that prisoner is on death row). I am merely suggesting some contemplation of that balance, lest we allow the newsworthy exceptions to wag the boring - but perhaps remarkably accurate - dog.
Posted by: mark | October 13, 2009 1:01 PM