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As a state legislator, I served on the House committee that drafted Ohio’s current death penalty law. Later, as Ohio Attorney General, I monitored 18 executions. I believed that the criminal justice system does not make mistakes, especially in murder cases. However, with nearly 800 wrongful murder convictions identified in the U.S. since 1989, I now know that we must do much more to protect innocent people from wrongful conviction – and even wrongful execution.
I was introduced to a wrongful murder conviction by the case of Clarence Elkins, a family man wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering his mother-in-law and raping his six-year-old niece in Barberton in 1998. He was convicted largely because his niece identified the perpetrator as looking like her Uncle Clarence. She recanted her identification, but it was not enough to overturn Elkins’s conviction. He then fought for DNA testing using more advanced technology, which excluded him as a match to critical evidence.
The State should have pursued the truth, but instead, it argued the DNA was contaminated and unreliable. Because Elkins got access to the...
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