THE NATION, and especially Boston, has been presented in recent years with much evidence that the criminal-justice system goes astray by producing erroneous convictions in a disturbingly large number of cases. A good number of these wrongful convictions are the result of police and prosecutorial techniques, including some that rise to the level of obvious misconduct (such as threatening witnesses or making up confessions) and others that bespeak a simple lack of professionalism (such as the failure to preserve for scientific testing items containing bodily tissue and fluids). These lapses and worse characterize both the state criminal-justice system and, as we have seen recently, even the vaunted FBI and US Department of Justice. The techniques used to produce wrongful convictions were catalogued in gripping and persuasive detail two years ago by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, co-founders of the Cardozo School of Law's Innocence Project, in their best-selling book co-authored with New York Times crime reporter Jim Dwyer, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted (Doubleday, 2000). Indeed, in recent years support for the death penalty has been falling precipitously, and even a number of justices on the pro-death-penalty US Supreme Court have voiced doubts of late, largely as a result of the disturbingly high number of cases in which post-conviction DNA tests have lifted the veil on wrongful convictions. Yet not every wrongly convicted defendant is lucky enough to have DNA evidence to fall back on. As police detective Barnicle admitted and the state's forensic examiner testified in the Pierce case, the collection of potential DNA evidence in the Pierce case was flubbed.

This is not to say, of course, that the police and prosecutors in the Pierce attempted-murder trial in fact engaged in misconduct. Nor is it clear that pressure from the prosecution rather than the defense side accounted in all instances for the startling number of recantations among the prosecution's witnesses. Indeed, the jurors treated witnesses individually, believing the recantations of three key witnesses — Pierce, Henderson, and Nunes — but not that of a fourth, Bostick. But surely both judges and the news media should take into account new revelations of just how the system can go awry. If we are serious in avowing that the wrongful conviction of an innocent person is worse than the occasional failure to convict a guilty defendant, we need to adopt a more searching understanding of how justice is done, and how it is sometimes defeated.

Harvey Silverglate is the co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (HarperPerennial, 1999) and a partner in the law firm of Silverglate & Good.