S H A M b l o g

Here's yet another case , tragic in countless senses, where overzealous prosecutors jumped the gun and focused on the wrong suspect — the father, who spent eight months in jail — before learning six years later that someone else, in this instance a convicted sex offender, had done the grisly deed. The remarkabl e work of The Innocence Project teaches us that these episodes are hardly a rarity. All told, as of this writing, Scheck, Neufeld et al have freed 254 convicts who were wrongly (and, too often, wrongfully) co nvicted. This is why I've said many times that the standards of evidence, or what we call evidence, are way too lenient. (See particularly here and here . If you're a glutton for punishment [no pun intended], you might also want to read my long September '09 piece for Skeptic , " Criminal Injustice .") I am gravitating more and m ore to the position that if there isn't verifiable physical evidence linking someone to a crime scene, no charg