This weekend we’re watching: Injustice in a world of racist and classist brutality

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Police brutality, institutionalised racism, casual disregard for the poor – foul relics of an oppressive past. We’re not talking about South Africa, but we might as well be. This weekend we’re taking a look at America’s merciless criminal justice system and the innocent people caught in its clutches.

The Innocence Files:

Letters. Piles of them. Thousands upon thousands neatly stacked and filed, the desperate pleas of bitter and broken men and women discarded by society.

Imagine being the recipient of these letters. Imagine the immense weight of knowing that any of these thousands of people may be innocent, and whether they get to see freedom or not will depend on you because they have no one left to fight for them.

That is the burden which was taken on by the founders of The Innocence Project.

1986 was probably the most important year in the history of forensics. It was the year when DNA profiling was used to aid a criminal investigation for the first time. It was this feat of science which, six years later, birthed The Innocence Project, an organisation which uses DNA testing to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals, with the ultimate goal of reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustices.

The Innocence Files is a Netflix docuseries directed by Roger Ross Williams, which unearths the inadequacy of the American criminal justice system and its use of inaccurate forensic pseudoscience as evidence. Each episode deals with a prominent case in which The Innocence Project used DNA evidence to clear the names of wrongfully imprisoned men.

In the late 70s, serial killer Ted Bundy was convicted using bite marks as evidence in a highly publicised and televised trial. Suddenly bite mark evidence was in vogue, and the following years saw an explosion of dental experts in American courtrooms. Men were sentenced to lifetimes in prison based on bruises on a murder victim’s leg or arm.

The villain of this series is the American criminal justice system itself, but if it had a face, it would be the pudgy bespectacled mug of Dr Michael West. This confederate fundamentalist quack is a disgraced forensic odontologist responsible for numerous wrongful convictions based on the capricious field of bite mark analysis.