DNA exonerations of the wrongly convicted recently reached the 250 mark,
and it's important to keep sight of the depressing truth this suggests: our prisons house many innocent people. (False confessions
are a major cause of wrongful convictions, but hardly the only one.) This fact has major ramifications -- for the death penalty,
for post-conviction DNA testing, for resources to assist defendants, and much more. But little will be done until politicians
and law enforcement acknowledge the scope of the problem.
