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government after having spent 23 years in prison. After being tied to it by DNA<br />
evidence, serial rapist Larry Fisher was convicted of the murder in 1999.<br />
In 1992, Guy Paul Morin was convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of an 8-year-old<br />
girl and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1995, new testing of DNA evidence<br />
showed Morin could not have been the murderer, and the Ontario Court of Appeal<br />
overturned his conviction. The case has been described as "a compendium of official<br />
error – from inaccurate eyewitness testimony and police tunnel vision, to scientific<br />
bungling and the suppression of evidence." Morin received $1.25 million in<br />
compensation from the Ontario government.<br />
Italy<br />
Enzo Tortora, a TV host on<br />
national RAI television, was<br />
accused of being a member<br />
of the Camorra and drug<br />
trafficking. He was arrested in<br />
1983, and sentenced to ten<br />
years in jail in 1985, but<br />
acquitted of all charges on<br />
appeal in 1986.<br />
Raffaele Sollecito and<br />
American Amanda Knox were<br />
sentenced to 26 years<br />
imprisonment for the<br />
2007 Murder of Meredith<br />
Kercher. They were released in 2011 after an appeal court found there was no credible<br />
evidence against them. Petty burglar Rudy Guede has been convicted of murder and<br />
sexual assault in connection with the death of Ms. Kercher.<br />
The Netherlands<br />
The Schiedammerpark murder case, as well as the similarly overturned case of the<br />
Putten murder, led to the installation of the "Posthumus I committee", which analyzed<br />
what had gone wrong in the Schiedammer park Murder case, and came to the<br />
conclusion that confirmation bias led the police to ignore and misinterpret scientific<br />
evidence (DNA). Subsequently, the so-called Posthumus II committee investigated<br />
whether other such cases might have occurred. The committee received 25 applications<br />
from concerned and involved scientists, and decided to consider three of them further:<br />
the Lucia de Berk case, the Ina Post case, and the Enschede incest case. In these<br />
three cases, independent researchers (professors Wagenaar, van Koppen, Israëls,<br />
Crombag, and Derksen) claim confirmation bias and misuse of complex scientific<br />
evidence led to miscarriages of justice.<br />
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