Once found guilty, he's an innocent man

By any measure, it's a historic moment: A man found guilty has, 17 years later, been found innocent.

The extraordinary tale of Greg Taylor, found innocent by a commission of three judges this week after being convicted of murder by a jury of his peers in 1993, should send shivers up the spine of the criminal justice system. Taylor owes his freedom to North Carolina's unique Innocence Commission, which has the power to review allegedly wrongful convictions and find convicted prisoners innocent, regardless of what a jury might have found. Testimony at the hearing into Taylor's conviction found that exculpatory evidence was ignored, evidence presented to jurors was misleading or incomplete and police and prosecutors focused their investigation on Taylor and ignored contradictory evidence.

But here's the clincher: A jury can be wrong. Other men have been exonerated in recent years by new DNA evidence that had not been available at trial. Darryl Hunt was twice convicted of rape and murder before DNA evidence proved his innocence. Dwayne Dail was identified by a rape victim and convicted, but DNA evidence proved the victim's identification to be wrong. What makes Taylor's exoneration unique is that DNA evidence was not involved. Here was a case of a judicial commission determining that a jury had been misled in coming to a wrong conclusion.

The constitutional protection of a jury of one's peers assumes that 12 people will be able to sift the truth from evidence fairly presented at trial. This system reforms an earlier, easily abused system of verdicts handed down by monarchs, chiefs, dictators or appointed judges. But the current system is obviously not foolproof, and the weak link may be the prosecutors. In North Carolina, district attorneys wield tremendous power. They can decide what charges to file and when to hold a trial. District attorneys control the court calendar, giving them great leverage over a defendant or defense attorney by dragging out pretrial confinement or selecting a favorable judge. And in some cases, we now know, prosecutors can present incomplete or misleading evidence in their search for a conviction. North Carolina elects district attorneys, but these elections are only rarely high-profile. And some high-profile D.A. elections go horribly wrong, as in the case of Mike Nifong in Durham.

Greg Taylor will never get 17 years of his life back. Darryl Hunt will never get two decades of his life back (though he did get a large financial settlement). The defendants in the Edenton Little Rascals day care scandal had their lives ruined on the basis of perhaps well-intentioned but clearly hysterical and unfounded claims about child abuse.

The Innocence Commission is a brave step in righting wrongs in the criminal justice system, but the state could go further. Prosecutorial misconduct should be better monitored, and district attorneys' imbalance of power in the system should be limited (an independent trial calendar manager would be a simple step). That said, the vast majority of convictions in North Carolina are fair and just. Most of the time, the system works as it was designed to. But even one mistake is one too many.