Van de Kamp heads panel to study state’s criminal justice system
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Van de Kamp |
Former State Bar President John Van de Kamp will chair the California Commission
on the Fair Administration of Justice, a nonpartisan panel studying how to
improve the state’s criminal justice system. Van de Kamp, who served
as attorney general from 1982-1990, was appointed by the Senate Rules Committee
last month.
The commission was created in 2004 to examine flaws in the criminal justice
system that might lead to wrongful convictions and suggest ways to prevent
such convictions. It has until the end of 2007 to report back to the legislature.
Van de Kamp immediately named University of Santa Clara Law School professor
Gerald Uelman as the group’s executive director and submitted five names
to the rules committee to bring the commission’s membership to about
20. The commission was expected to meet late last month and has scheduled a
March 15 hearing in San Francisco on the issue of false identification.
“We’re looking at why cases are getting reversed and what procedures
can mitigate those factors,” Van de Kamp said. “We’ll take
up a variety of subjects,” he added, ranging from how lineups are conducted
to the death penalty.
The commission’s focus, he said, is “wrongful convictions and
being able to provide safeguards and improvements to prevent that.”
Since 1989, eight convicted individuals have been exonerated through DNA testing,
said Cookie Ridolfi, director of the Northern California Innocence Project,
a clinic at Santa Clara’s law school. Nationally, there have been 173
exonerations in the same time period.
But Ridolfi pointed out that few cases involve DNA evidence, and in more than
half the cases that do, the evidence has been lost, destroyed or degraded.
She said California has come late to the problem of wrongful conviction. “It’s
not that it’s new, it’s just that now, we’re getting the
attention,” she said. “I think California is finally starting to
get it.”
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