By Stacey Patton

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which denies prisoners the constitutional right to post-conviction DNA testing that could prove their innocence, says something bigger about the quality of justice in America.

Upholding such a right has potential economic and psychological consequences for those in the business of locking people up: police officers, judges, prosecutors, prison guards, etc. It is also possible that granting far-reaching constitutional access to evidence could threaten a system that is designed to control and oppress primarily people of color.

Simply put, allowing too much justice throws into question the underlying principles that are so fundamental to the functioning of the criminal justice system. Although it has been proven in more than 200 cases across the country that DNA testing separates the innocent from the guilty, the Court has decided to abdicate its duty to seek justice.

William Osborne

In its 5 to 4 decision, the Court found against William G. Osborne, a convicted rapist from Alaska-one of three states without a law granting convicts access to new technology. Fifteen years ago, the state used a method known as DQ-alpha testing on a blue condom found at the crime scene. That old method could not specifically identify the person to whom biological material belonged. Osborne sought to do an STR test, which is more precise and could definitively prove his innocence. But the Alaska state courts and now, the Supreme Court, rejected his request.

In its opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the majority of the justices acknowledged the benefits of DNA testing but also stated that the availability of new technology “cannot mean that every criminal conviction, or even every conviction involving biological evidence, is suddenly in doubt.”

“There is nothing good about this decision,” said Christina Swarns, Director of LDF’s Criminal Justice Practice Group. “The only silver lining is that the ruling does not affect an enormous number of people.”

Swarns called the ruling “horrendous” in legal terms and said it is absurd for the Court to impose impediments of any kind on a defendant’s ability to prove innocence, especially when there is no economic burden on the state. She maintained that the state’s only interests should be in the finality of an accurate conviction.

“The most charitable interpretation of this message is that the Court has left the matter in the hands of legislatures to create mechanisms in their states that would allow testing,” Swarns said.

The federal government and 46 states have already enacted laws that allow inmates’ access to DNA testing, and there is nothing to prevent Alaska, Alabama and Oklahoma from changing their laws. Though the ruling only affects the hopes of defendants in those three states, broader implications remain.

Now that access to DNA testing is not a free-standing constitutional right, the latest ruling invites questions as to whether current statutes will face constitutional challenges. Swarns fears that prosecutors may start objecting to or failing to comply with measures that allow for DNA testing.

In economic terms, widespread testing could possibly jeopardize the prison industrial complex. The expense of DNA testing, litigation costs and drain on restitution funds (which some states don’t have), could be paralyzing. Imagine if hundreds or thousands of wrongfully-convicted persons successfully prove their innocence and the burden of the costs and lawsuits is left in the hands of the states? Not to mention the costs of reopening investigations and prosecuting the real perpetrators of crime.

And what of the psychological affects on the arbiters of the criminal justice system who for decades have been responding to economic and racial imperatives? Proving widespread innocence and incompetence in the criminal justice system could potentially devastate livelihoods. It would also undermine public confidence in the system’s ability to function accurately.

The impact of a shoddy criminal justice system is especially hard on African Americans, Latinos and other people who are stuck in poverty and susceptible to low-level crime.

“We have a system that condones racial disparities,” said Swarns. “There is scientific proof that convictions occurring under that system are inaccurate, and the majority of those receiving wrongful convictions are black, but the Supreme Court will do nothing to remedy the problem.

“This decision leaves a chilling effect on the innocence movement and the efforts of civil rights advocates to demonstrate how flawed the criminal justice system in this country is,” Swarns added.

When the Supreme Court heard District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne in early March, Chief Justice John Roberts repeatedly expressed his concern that if the Court made DNA testing a constitutional right then it would open for debate a whole range of other problems, though he didn’t specifically cite what those problems were.

Could it be that the central problem is a fear of too much justice for folks of a darker hue, bound in a system whose very survival is dependent upon the denial of their freedom.

As the playwright Lorraine Hansberry put it in 1965, the oppression of black people in this country “is not a random, helter-skelter, hit-or-miss matter of discrimination here and there against people who just happen to be of a different color . . . It is, as the ruling class perfectly well knows, a highly concentrated, universal, and deliberate blanket of oppression pulled tightly and securely over [millions of black] citizens of this country.”

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor of TheDefendersOnline and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.