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Barry Scheck

The Innocence Project

I've never had a problem being a criminal defense lawyer. I think it's liberty's last champion.

Barry Scheck was born in New York City. His father, George, had worked his way up from childhood poverty to a successful career as a manager of singers and musicians. The family suffered a devastating loss when young Barry was in elementary school. His sister died in a fire that destroyed the family home and injured his parents. Barry struggled in school for a few years after this disaster, but by high school he was excelling in his studies. George Scheck’s professional relationships with African Americans drew him to the Civil Rights Movement, and like his parents, Barry took an interest in questions of social justice. He became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements while still in his teens. At Yale University, Barry Scheck studied economic history and city planning, graduating in 1971. Accepted by a number of law schools, he chose Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley.

Defense attorney Barry Scheck cross examines a prosecution witness as prosecutors Hank Goldberg and Marcia Clark, defense attorney Robert Shapiro, and prosecutor Christopher Darden look on during the 1995 double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles. Scheck presented the science of DNA testing to jurors and to the public watching the trial on TV, attacking police methods of evidence collection and demolishing the prosecution's forensic evidence case. (AP Photo)
Barry Scheck cross-examines a prosecution witness as prosecutors Hank Goldberg and Marcia Clark, defense attorney Robert Shapiro, and prosecutor Christopher Darden look on during the 1995 double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles. Scheck presented the science of DNA testing to jurors and to the public watching the trial on TV, attacking police methods of evidence collection and demolishing the prosecution’s forensic evidence case.

After completing his law degree in 1974, he co-authored the manual Raising and Litigating Electronic Surveillance Claims in Criminal Cases for the National Lawyers Guild Electronic Surveillance Project. Returning to New York City, he served as a public defender in the South Bronx at the height of its mid-’70s crime wave. As a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society, he made the acquaintance of another young attorney, Peter Neufeld. The two became close friends and eventually law partners.

Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997. Attorney Barry Scheck speaks in defense of British nanny Louise Woodward, who was accused of killing an eight-month-old child in her care. The man at left is Dr. Patrick Barnes, a neuroradiologist who testified for the prosecution. In later years, advances in brain scanning technology led Dr. Barnes to revise his opinion of the case. (AP Photo)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997: Barry Scheck speaks in defense of British nanny Louise Woodward, who was accused of killing an eight-month-old child in her care. At left is Dr. Patrick Barnes, a neuroradiologist who testified for the prosecution. Later, advances in brain scanning technology led Barnes to revise his opinion of the case. (AP)

After three years at the Legal Aid Society, he joined the faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. At Cardozo, he was one of the early practitioners of clinical education in the law. Traditional legal education in the United States emphasized theory and classroom instruction. Clinical education gives law students experience dealing with actual cases in a mentoring relationship with practicing attorneys, much as medical students pass through internships and residencies following their classroom training.

Former nanny Louise Woodward and her attorney Barry Scheck speak to reporters in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1998. The previous year, Woodward was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of an infant in her care. In a post-relief hearing, the judge reduced the verdict to involuntary manslaughter, and sentenced her to time already served. She returned to her native Britain. She and Scheck were in Edinburgh to participate in a debate on permitting cameras in British courtrooms. (AP Photo)
1998: Former nanny Louise Woodward and her attorney, Barry Scheck, speak to reporters in Edinburgh, Scotland. Woodward was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of an infant in her care. In a post-relief hearing, the judge reduced the verdict to involuntary manslaughter, and sentenced her to time served. She returned to her native Britain. They were in Edinburgh to participate in a debate on permitting cameras in British courtrooms. (AP)

As a clinical professor, Scheck led his students through several major cases involving domestic violence. In 1987, one of these attracted massive media attention and polarized public opinion. Hedda Nussbaum, a children’s book author and former editor at Random House, was living with an attorney named Joel Steinberg when the couple took custody of two children Steinberg had met through his law practice. When one of the children died after being struck by Steinberg, both adults were arrested and charged with complicity in the child’s death. Witness testimony and medical evidence made it clear that Nussbaum had been repeatedly beaten as well, and was suffering from severe physical injuries. Public opinion was divided as to whether Nussbaum should be regarded as complicit in the child’s death, or whether she too should be regarded as a victim. Scheck succeeded in having charges against Nussbaum dropped, and she testified against Steinberg, who was convicted of manslaughter. The trial was broadcast live on local television in New York, provoking a public debate on domestic violence.

Cuban national Orlando Bosquete, left, celebrates with his lawyers Nina Morrison and Barry Scheck, after a judge orders him released from prison. In 2006, DNA evidence presented by Morrison and Scheck proved Bosquete had not committed the sex crimes he was convicted of 20 years earlier. (AP Photo)
Cuban national Orlando Bosquete, left, celebrates with his lawyers Nina Morrison and Barry Scheck, after a judge orders him released from prison. In 2006, DNA evidence presented by Morrison and Scheck proved Bosquete had not committed the sex crimes he was convicted of 20 years earlier. Scheck co-founded The Innocence Project in 1992 with Peter Neufeld, his co-counsel on the O.J. Simpson defense team. It is dedicated to the utilization of DNA evidence as a means to exculpate individuals of crimes for which they were wrongfully convicted. By 2017, 343 wrongful convictions have been overturned by DNA testing thanks to the Project and other legal organizations.

In 1985, Scheck and his partner, Peter Neufeld, received a call from their old employer, the Legal Aid Society. A young man named Marion Coakley had been convicted of a brutal rape and robbery, despite credible evidence he could not have been in the place where the events occurred. Convinced that the jury had convicted the wrong man, Scheck and Neufeld agreed to conduct Coakley’s appeal. After two years in prison, Coakley was freed when Scheck and Neufeld demonstrated through fingerprint and blood evidence that someone other than Coakley had committed the crime. In the course of their research, they became aware of the new field of DNA analysis and its potential use as evidence in criminal investigations.

Through forums at Cardozo Law School, Scheck and Neufeld generated public support for the use of DNA testing. They soon learned that while genetic science properly applied could serve the cause of justice, the same science applied haphazardly could lead to wrongful convictions as well. For six years, Scheck worked through the courts, the media, the Department of Justice, and the National Academy of Science to establish rigorous standards for the use of DNA evidence in criminal proceedings.

Halfway through his 50-year prison sentence, Larry Fuller leaves the courtroom a free man. He celebrates with his attorneys, Vanessa Plotkin and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, who used DNA evidence to prove he could not have committed the crime for which he was imprisoned. (© Jim Mahoney/Dallas Morning News/Corbis)
Dallas, TX, October 31, 2006: Halfway through his 50-year prison sentence, Larry Fuller leaves the Judicial District Court a free man. He celebrates with his attorneys, Vanessa Plotkin and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, who used DNA evidence to prove he could not have committed the crime for which he was imprisoned. (Corbis)

In 1992, Scheck and Neufeld established the Innocence Project, an independent nonprofit foundation that uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. The Project also assists all parties in the criminal justice system — police, prosecutors, and defense attorneys — to improve the collection and evaluation of evidence in all forms, from interrogation, eyewitness testimony, and the handling of physical evidence to the latest developments in forensic science. In its first years of operation, the Project uncovered dozens of cases of defendants convicted and imprisoned for crimes they had not committed. In these and many cases that followed, the application of modern forensic science, especially DNA evidence, proved the innocence of the accused and set them free after years of imprisonment. In 1994, Scheck was appointed to serve as a commissioner on New York State’s Forensic Science Review Board, a body that regulates all crime and forensic DNA laboratories in the state.

Scheck’s work drew national attention in 1995 when he was asked to assist the defense in the case of O.J. Simpson, the former professional football star accused of murdering his ex-wife and a bystander. At first Scheck was simply asked to advise on the admissibility of DNA evidence, but as the case developed he took an increasingly prominent role. The trial, broadcast live on network television, was the first case to receive such intense media coverage. Scheck’s eight-day cross-examination of a police criminologist exposed grievous errors in the handling of evidence by the Los Angeles Police Department, and was considered a major factor in Simpson’s eventual acquittal. Although the case focused public attention on the significance of DNA evidence, Scheck has stated in subsequent interviews that he felt the sensational coverage of the trial, and of subsequent high-profile cases, has not been beneficial to the criminal justice system.

Barry Scheck shares his experiences with the Academy of Achievement delegates at the 2008 Summit in Hawaii.

Scheck soon took on another highly publicized and controversial case. In 1997, the 19-year-old British au pair Louise Woodward was accused of causing the death of an infant in her care. Prosecution held that the child had died from injuries caused by excessive shaking, and by striking his head against a hard surface. Scheck, defending Woodward, produced physical evidence inconsistent with the prosecution’s case, including evidence of injuries that may have been sustained before Woodward was employed by the baby’s family. After a trial followed intently on both sides of the Atlantic, the jury found Woodward guilty of second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced her to life in prison. Scheck filed post-trial motions, reexamining the medical evidence, and in a post-trial hearing, the judge reduced her conviction to manslaughter and her sentence to the 279 days she had already served.

Barry Scheck receives the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement from Academy member Ralph Nader at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii. (© Academy of Achievement)
Barry Scheck receives the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement from Awards Council member and famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.

In the year following the Woodward trial, Scheck was appointed to a two-year term on the National Institute of Justice’s Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. Despite Scheck’s misgivings about the publicity generated by the O.J. Simpson trial, he had more positive feelings about the lead counsel in the Simpson case, Johnnie Cochran. In 1998, Scheck and Neufeld formed a partnership with him, specializing in civil rights cases, not least those involving the excessive and inappropriate use of force by police. Together, they took the case of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who had been brutally beaten and violated while in police custody. While two of the policemen involved were eventually convicted and imprisoned for their role in the incident, Scheck and his partners sought civil damages from the city and from the policemen’s union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which had allegedly tried to conceal the crime. In 2001, Louima accepted a settlement of $8.75 million.

In the same year, Scheck and the Innocence Project secured the exoneration of Kenneth Waters, who had already served 18 years of a life sentence for murder and robbery. This case, and the extraordinary efforts of his sister Betty Ann to win his freedom, became the subject of the 2010 feature film, Conviction. Sadly, Waters died only six months after leaving prison. At age 47, he had spent over a third of his life imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Another notable victory for the Innocence Project was the the case of George Rodriguez, convicted of rape in Houston, Texas. Substantial evidence pointed to another man, and Rodriguez was apparently at work at the time, far from the scene of the crime. In 2005, the Innocence Project succeeded in having the conviction of Rodriguez overturned, after he had spent 17 years in prison. In a subsequent civil rights case, Scheck demonstrated a pattern of misconduct in the Houston crime lab, including suppression and fabrication of evidence to secure convictions, and won a judgment for Rodriguez against the City of Houston.

Barry Scheck, actor Sam Rockwell, Betty Anne Waters, and actress Hilary Swank attend a special screening of the film Conviction for the Innocence Project in 2010. In the film, Ms. Swank plays Ms. Waters, a single mother who put herself through law school to secure the release of her brother, imprisoned for 18 years for a murder he did not commit. With the assistance of Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project, Kenneth Waters was freed in 2001. (© Martin Roe/Retna Ltd./CORBIS)
New York City, 2010: Barry Scheck, actor Sam Rockwell, Betty Anne Waters, and actress Hilary Swank attend a screening of the film Conviction for the Innocence Project. In the film, Ms. Swank plays Ms. Waters, a single mother who put herself through law school to secure the release of her brother, imprisoned for 18 years for a murder he did not commit. With the assistance of Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project, Kenneth Waters was freed in 2001.

Scheck and Neufeld shared their experiences in a 2000 book, Actual Innocence. Since the death of Johnnie Cochran, their firm has been known as Neufeld Scheck and Brustin, LLP. In addition to practicing law, Barry Scheck continues to serve on the Forensic Science Review Board of New York State, and as Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he is Emeritus Director of Clinical Education, and Co-Director of the Trial Advocacy Programs and the Jacob Burns Center for the Study of Law and Ethics. He is a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He remains Co-Director of the Innocence Project.

2017: Barry Scheck addresses delegates and members at a symposium at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire, England, during the American Academy of Achievement’s 52nd annual International Achievement Summit.

Misidentification by witnesses and false confessions obtained through coercion remain the most common causes of wrongful conviction in criminal cases, but in the 25 years following the introduction of DNA evidence, over 300 wrongly convicted defendants have been freed through its use. In addition to assisting the wrongly convicted, the Innocence Project advises other firms and organizations on the use of DNA evidence and promotes its use worldwide through the International Innocence Network.

Barry Scheck, the Co-Founder of the Innocence Project, presenting the Golden Plate Award to Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama.
2019: Barry Scheck, the Co-Founder of the Innocence Project, presenting the Academy’s Golden Plate Award to acclaimed lawyer Bryan Stevenson, the Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama, during the 53rd International Achievement Summit in New York City.

Before mitochondrial DNA testing of hair samples was introduced in 2000, microscopic comparison of hair samples was the form of hair analysis used in criminal investigations. As questions arose about the past accuracy of microscopic hair analysis, the FBI ordered a review of the work of its hair analysis unit prior to 2000. The Innocence Project, working with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, carried out a review of evidence provided by the FBI, and in 2015 announced that 26 of the 28 examiners in the FBI’s hair analysis unit had given flawed testimony in criminal cases, and that this occurred in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials that were examined. In most cases, the examiners had overstated the evidence. The cases involved 46 states, and had led to convictions resulting in 32 death sentences. Of those, 14 defendants had either been executed or died in prison. The surviving defendants have been notified, and it is expected that many of them may choose to file appeals. While the findings of this investigation are appalling, they do remind us of the tremendous advance that DNA testing represents for the criminal justice system, and of the enormous value of the work done by the Innocence Project.

Inducted Badge
Inducted in 2008

Barry Scheck has been honored as the most outstanding criminal defense lawyer in America. A pioneer of the use of DNA evidence, he co-founded the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York City. In the past decade, the Project has helped secure the exoneration of more than 300 men previously convicted of crimes they did not commit, many of whom would have faced execution but for the intervention of Scheck and his associates. He describes many of these cases in his book Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted.

Scheck may be best known to the American public as the DNA expert on the O.J. Simpson defense team, an occasion he saw as an opportunity to promote higher standards in the handling of DNA evidence. He has frequently served as an expert advisor to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and has assisted in the investigation of unsolved crimes such as the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

He has served as counsel in numerous civil and criminal actions involving the rights of battered women and incidents of police brutality, including the Abner Louima police assault incident in New York. He co-founded the Innocence Project after six years of litigation to establish standards for the use of DNA evidence in U.S. courts.

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You’ve tried a lot of famous cases, but let’s talk about the one that led to the founding of the Innocence Project, Marion Coakley.

Barry Scheck: The way that the Innocence Project really got started was this case of Marion Coakley, who was a man who was convicted of a rape based on the testimony of three eyewitnesses in the Bronx. That he broke into a motel and raped a woman and her boyfriend at gunpoint, and then put the woman in a car and drove to her home, and got more money from her relatives, and then abandoned the car and left. So there were these three eyewitnesses: the rape victim, her boyfriend, and the brother that gave money. And he had 17 alibi witnesses that he was at a prayer meeting in the other side of the Bronx — 17.  The reverend, all the members of the congregation, and anybody that knew Marion knew that he really couldn’t drive and he was probably incapable of making it from the prayer meeting to the motel and back.  There was really no way of explaining how he could have committed this crime.

He had a fairly low IQ, I believe.

Barry Scheck: Yes. And then there was some serology at that trial.

Explain serology, please.

Barry Scheck: Part of the evidence against Marion is that it appeared as though — before the era of DNA testing, forensic scientists would use what they called conventional serological methods, because people secrete blood group substances into their semen or into the vaginal discharge or saliva. So that would be analyzed to look for blood types, and also what they call conventional protein markers. And in Marion Coakley’s case, I believe — if I recall it correctly — they were saying that the only blood type that they got from the vaginal swab that was taken from the victim in this crime was blood type O, and Marion was blood type A.  So in theory, he could not have been a contributor, right, because he was blood type A.  So the prosecution put on a serologist, a good guy named Dr. Robert Shaler from the New York City Medical Examiner’s office, and said, “Well, is it possible that somebody could be a low level secretor?”  So even though they secreted blood group substances into their semen, but there was not very much, so you could get a false negative for the A.  And he said, “Well yes, in theory, that’s true.”  And that contributed to Marion Coakley’s conviction.  So we were given this case by our old public defender’s office in the Bronx, and Peter Neufeld and I, along with students, decided to work on it.

Was this on appeal?

Barry Scheck: It was after he was convicted, but before a direct appeal. Everybody in the office was just so shocked that he was convicted, based on the testimony of the three eyewitnesses.

So we decided to take on the case, and there was a company called Lifecodes that had just begun DNA testing. It wasn’t in the courtrooms, and it was one of the two or three commercial companies that first tried to transfer this technology from medical and research purposes to the forensic arena. Dr. Shaler had gone to work for Lifecodes, so we said, “Bob, let’s get Lifecodes to do DNA testing on this case, because maybe this will prove that Coakley is innocent.” And they tried it, but they claimed that they didn’t get enough high molecular white DNA to get a result, and then we went out and did quite a number of things to prove Marion innocent the old-fashioned way. We found a palm print on the rear view mirror of the car that the perpetrator had abandoned, and they had taken, and we showed that it wasn’t Marion’s, and that analysis had never been done. We found exculpatory evidence that hadn’t been turned over.  And we literally had Marion Coakley ejaculate at different times in Attica Prison — which we found very disturbing, it was hard for him to do — to prove that he wasn’t a low level secretor.  So we proved him innocent anyhow, but we saw immediately that this DNA testing would be transformative for the criminal justice system.  So we held a forum at Cardozo Law School with a number of people that were at the very early stages of using forensic DNA testing. I think it was the first such program that we’d had in a law school and became very interested in the topic.  And then Governor Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, appointed Peter and I to a commission to look at the transfer of DNA technology to forensic purposes. And we became involved with some people at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, this fellow Jan Witkowksi, who then in turn introduced us to a number of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor seminars. And that is really how we got our start in dealing with DNA evidence in the criminal justice system.

Defense attorney Barry Scheck cross examines a prosecution witness as prosecutors Hank Goldberg and Marcia Clark, defense attorney Robert Shapiro, and prosecutor Christopher Darden look on during the 1995 double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles. Scheck presented the science of DNA testing to jurors and to the public watching the trial on TV, attacking police methods of evidence collection and demolishing the prosecution's forensic evidence case. (AP Photo)
Barry Scheck cross-examines a prosecution witness as prosecutors Hank Goldberg and Marcia Clark, defense attorney Robert Shapiro, and prosecutor Christopher Darden look on during the 1995 double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles. Scheck presented the science of DNA testing to jurors and to the public watching the trial on TV, attacking police methods of evidence collection and demolishing the prosecution’s forensic evidence case.

In the early ’90s, late ’80s, you and Peter Neufeld were critical of the use of DNA testing in some cases. Famously, you called into question the DNA evidence in the O.J. Simpson criminal case.

Barry Scheck: Well, what really happened is that…

Keys to success — Perseverance

Right after the Marion Coakley case, there was another case involving an individual named Castro in the Bronx.  After we did this seminar at Cardozo Law School, one of the people from the public defender’s office says, “You guys are very interested in this. Could you do the admissibility hearing? The prosecution wants to prove that blood on Mr. Castro’s watch is not his blood, but is actually the blood from the murder victim.” So we were initially very suspicious, based on our early dealings with Lifecodes, because we could see that they hadn’t published peer-reviewed articles, and they hadn’t done some of the basic validation research that you would expect for this technology transfer. So we got the evidence in this case, and we never contested in the Castro case that the exclusion… that the blood on the watch wasn’t from Castro. Because the way these DNA tests work, you would see these bands. They had what they called a RFLP testing at that time, that had to do with bands going down in a gel and you would see it. The bands were clearly not aligned, then it was an exclusion, and there was no dispute about the exclusion.  So we didn’t dispute that. But when they said, “Well, these bands that don’t look the same are really the same, and then we can make an inference about the statistical significance of that by looking at population genetic evidence.” Well, there was some very serious scientific problems with that. So we went to these Cold Spring Harbor seminars, and we started showing what they called the auto rads and some of the data to the scientists there. And we ran into this Dr. Eric Lander, who’s quite an extraordinary figure, very brilliant man. He was looking at it, and he immediately realized, “Oh my God, here we are in the genetics community, and we all believe that this technology transfer is going to work, because it is such a robust technology, and of course DNA testing is going to work.”  But then, he saw how this was being misapplied, and they had not done the right validation studies to prove that the things matched, and they hadn’t done the population genetics work adequately to give us a real statement about what the significance of it was within certain populations.

The probability.

Barry Scheck: The probability. So we contested that in court.

Keys to success — Vision

It was quite an extraordinary… it is sort of a landmark case. Because what happened, we did a six-month evidentiary hearing. There were Nobel Prize winners on the prosecution side, we had all these great scientists.  And by the end of the hearing, Eric wrote an article about it in Nature. But what happened is he got the prosecution scientists to agree with our scientists about the data and they conceded. They wrote a joint statement at the end of the hearing that you couldn’t match the fragments, you couldn’t make an adequate statement about their significance, and called on the National Academy of Sciences to convene a panel immediately to help with the transfer of this technology from medical and research purposes to the forensic arena.  And that was really a great and extraordinary development.  That’s really how we began. So we knew immediately that DNA would prove a lot of people innocent.

And we knew, frankly, from the beginning, that it would change people’s view of eyewitness identification, confession evidence, all kinds of different forensic assays that had not been adequately validated.

Barry Scheck: After the Castro case, so we knew there were problems with DNA, but we also — and we wanted to see it work well and be admissible — but at the same time we saw the problems in this technology transfer, and were actively involved in that National Academy of Science report and the commission that was set up on the future of DNA testing by the Department of Justice that turned out to be very important.  So we started the Innocence Project in 1992, really even earlier than that we started working on these cases to use DNA to exonerate people who didn’t commit the crime. But what we are probably better known for, our involvement… we always knew the Innocence Project was going to be extraordinarily important, but it became inevitable when O.J. Simpson was driving around in the Bronco, and I was literally in Madison Square Garden watching a playoff game and seeing the Bronco going around. I just knew, “Oh, we are going to get called.” And sure enough, we did.

Why?

Barry Scheck: It had to do with blood stains on a walkway, and we knew that the defense lawyers would eventually call us just for advice on how to handle the serology evidence, how the DNA should be tested, because this was an area of expertise that we had, and the legal community all knew this. So literally, while they are doing the hearings, we would send questions to Jerry Uelmen and Bob Shapiro about how the evidence was processed, what they should ask, etc.  And then, it’s not something that we ever wanted, per se, but people forget that the DNA testing was going on before, even after they picked the jury they were still doing serological and DNA testing and other forensic testing in the Simpson case. So in any event, we were called in to be part of that defense team. And everybody thought that we were going to challenge the technology, per se.  And that is not something that we did, because that wasn’t really… the defense in the matter had to do with the way they mishandled its collection. And there’s not much good that could be said came out of the O.J. Simpson case for the American criminal justice system. I think it exacerbated problems of race in this country enormously.  I think it destroyed the sensible coverage of courts, with cameras in the courtroom.

Barry Scheck speaks to Academy delegates at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, CA.

It led to Nancy Grace.

Barry Scheck: It did. It led to the Nancy Gracification of coverage of trials, and more media circus, and less of an opportunity to learn.

I was very involved with my friend from college, Steve Brill, who started Court TV, and I think he started in a very serious way to make it real journalism, and really learn something from the coverage of trial courts. And the Simpson case was such an insane circus, I think it really set us all back that way. But the one interesting thing that did come out of it is that the way that we critique the DNA evidence, in terms of how it was picked up, because our whole position was “garbage in, garbage out.”  If you cross-contaminate the samples when you collect it, you can do all the DNA testing correctly, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get results about who really is the source of the evidence.  And the idea that you would pick up DNA, you would pick up things without wearing gloves, you did not change the gloves, and you would take blood stains and put them in plastic bags when they were wet, so the bacteria would eat away the DNA, and then put them in a hot truck, and then take them back to the lab.  And then put everything out on a table and open a purple top tube that contained Mr. Simpson’s DNA, and have an aerosol, and then touch all of the different samples. I mean, today that’s just insane and unthinkable.  And the truth of the matter is that the prosecutors who were brought in to do the DNA, Rock Harmon and the late Woody Clark — Woody was really a great guy, we miss him terribly — they understood what we were saying about the way the evidence was handled was accurate. And then later Woody and I were on this federal commission where we sent out things to police departments all over the United States, what everyone should know about DNA evidence: never put anything wet into a plastic bag, always change your gloves.  All of these — really the lessons of the Simpson case. So the critique of how the crime scene was handled was very important, and I think the forensic community recognized this changes everything.  You can’t use a 19th-century method of collecting evidence for a 20th-, 21st-century technology. So that’s about the only silver lining I can find in that case, if you must know the truth.