Pennsylvania advisory committee to study causes of wrongful conviction:  Capital Defense Weekly notes here the passage of Senate Resolution 381 by the Pennsylvania state senate creating an advisory committee to study the underlying causes of wrongful convictions in that state.

Arthur Folkes has this story in the Terre Haute Tribune on Pennsylvania death row exoneree Harold C. Wilson (one of six death-row exonerees from PA), who spent 16 years on death row before DNA evidence cast doubt on his conviction.

Excerpt:
After spending more than a decade on death row, Wilson was granted a new trial after a training video emerged in 1997 showing the lead prosecutor in his case coaching young prosecutors how to select jurors based on race, education, economic status, and age. In the video, the prosecutor, Jack McMahon, explicitly tells his audience to “keep blacks from low-income areas” off juries.

“It may appear you’re being racist, but again, you’re just being realistic. … The other side is doing the same thing,” McMahon says in the video.

Wilson was granted a new trial in 2003 after a court found McMahon had used race to eliminate black jurors.

In Wilson’s new trial, defense attorneys presented DNA evidence – something unavailable in 1989 – that placed an unknown person at the murder scene. Wilson told the Ivy Tech audience that prosecutors tried to keep that evidence out of court, telling a DNA technician to “lose it.”

(More on Harold Wilson is in this article from the Sept. 14 Philadelphia City Paper.)