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prison for three rape-robberies and one rape-murder, admitted that he, and he alone, had committed the crime. He revealed details that no one else knew, and his DNA matched the DNA taken from semen found in the victim and on her sock. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, headed by Robert M. Morgenthau, investigated for nearly a year and could find no connection between Reyes and the boys who had been convicted. The DA’s office supported the defense motion to vacate the boys’ convictions, and in 2002 the motion was granted. But Morgenthau’s decision was angrily denounced by former prosecutors in his office and by the police officers who had been involved in the original investigation, who refused to believe that the boys were innocent.2 After all, they had confessed.

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In 1932, Yale law professor Edwin Borchard published Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice. Of those sixty-five cases that Borchard had investigated, eight involved defendants convicted of murder, even though the supposed victim turned up later, very much alive. You’d think that might be fairly convincing proof that police and prosecutors had made some serious mistakes, yet one prosecutor told Borchard, “Innocent men are never convicted. Don’t worry about it, it never happens … It is a physical impossibility.”

Then came DNA. Ever since 1989, the first year in which DNA testing resulted in the release of an innocent prisoner, the public has been repeatedly confronted with evidence that far from being an impossibility, convicting the innocent is much more common than we feared. The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, keeps a running record on its Web site of the hundreds of men and women imprisoned for murder or rape who have been cleared, most often by DNA testing but also by other kinds of evidence, such as mistaken eyewitness identifications.3 Death-row exonerations, of course, get the greatest public attention, but the number of wrongful convictions for lesser crimes is also alarming. After a comprehensive study of criminal cases in which the convicted person was indisputably exonerated, law professor Samuel R. Gross and his associates concluded that “if we reviewed prison sentences with the same level of care that we devote to death sentences, there would have been over 28,500 non-death-row exonerations in the past 15 years rather than the 255 that have in fact occurred.”4

This is uncomfortably dissonant information for anyone who wants to believe that the system works. Resolving it is hard enough for the average citizen, but if you are a participant in the justice system, your motivation to justify its mistakes, let alone yours, will be immense. Social psychologist Richard Ofshe, an expert on the psychology of false confessions, once observed that convicting the wrong person is “one of the worst professional errors you can make—like a physician amputating the wrong arm.”5

Suppose that you are presented with evidence that you did amputate the wrong arm: that you helped send the wrong person to prison. What do you do? Your first impulse will be to deny your mistake for the obvious reason of protecting your job, reputation, and colleagues. Besides, if you release someone who later commits a serious crime, or free someone who is innocent but who was erroneously imprisoned for a heinous crime such as child molesting, an outraged public may nail you for it; you have been “soft on crime.” 6 You have plenty of such external incentives for denying that you made a mistake, but you have a greater internal one: You want to think of yourself as an honorable, competent person who would never convict the wrong guy. But how can you possibly think you got the right guy in the face of the new evidence to the contrary? Because, you convince yourself, the evidence is lousy, and look, he’s a bad guy; even if he didn’t commit this particular crime, he undoubtedly committed another one. The alternative, that you sent an innocent man to prison for fifteen years, is so antithetical to your view of your competence