It should not need saying, but protecting women means protecting women of all races and ethnicities. The Central Park jogger case is a powerful reminder of this fact. The Central Park jogger case reminds us that the interests of defendants of color and the interests of female victims are also aligned in another way: The proper treatment of scientific evidence helps both. In the case of the Central Park jogger, the police had rounded up and obtained confessions from the five boys. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that seeks exonerations, reports that 28 percent of the exonerations it has obtained using DNA evidence involved defendants who made false confessions.

Source: New York Times June 18, 2019 15:22 UTC