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India may soon have an ‘innocence network’
India may soon have an ‘innocence network’ that aims to provide legal support to wrongly-sentenced convicts in proving their innocence
India may soon have an ‘innocence network’ that aims to provide legal support to wrongly-sentenced convicts in proving their innocence.
As of now, 12 countries have ‘innocence network’ or ‘project innocence’.
UP anti-terrorism squad (ATS) chief Dr GK Goswamy has been allowed by the UP government to be a part of the US-launched ‘project innocence’ in order to understand its implementation modalities.
Goswamy is, perhaps, the country’s first person to become a part of eh project.
“I am thankful to government for allowing me to go for the Fullbright-Nehru Academics and Professional Excellence Fellowship under which I have opted to do research on ‘project innocence’ which, in all likelihood, would soon be introduced in India also soon,” said Goswamy.
He said he always wanted to go for the fellowship programme and in 2019 applied for it.
“I am happy to say that in the law segment of this programme, I was awarded the highest grades under which I can visit any of the US universities twice in two years to do my research on ‘project innocence’,” said Goswamy.
“Since foreign scholars were not allowed for the programme in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic so I was asked to complete my research work by December 2023. I am leaving on April 1,” he added.
Project innocence:
“It originated in US,” he said and added that it would be a revolutionary move if replicated in our country. In February this year, Reynaldo Munoz became the 3000th exoneree in US as notified by the National Registry of Exonerations,” Goswamy said.
At the age of 17, Munoz was arrested for a murder in 1985 in Chicago that he had never committed, but was wrongly convicted in 1986 with 60 years imprisonment,” he added.
Goswamy said if ‘project innocence’ was implemented in India, it would help in dealing with wrongful convictions here, too.
The project, when implemented, would be taken care of by a team of legal experts, who would help in getting wrongly convicted individuals freed.
“There can be many causes for a wrong conviction. It could be mistaken eyewitness identification, false confessions, tunnel vision, defective informant testimony, plea bargaining, police and prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defence representation or forensic imperfections and expert misconduct, including forensic frauds,” he said.
When wrong conviction is possible in developed nations, the same is quite possible in India too, he added.
However, he said that replicating the same system would not be an easy task. “There are certain questions like: How the project will be replicated in India? What kind of cases would be tackled under this project? On what basis the cases would be categorized? These and other implementation modalities would be cleared only after the completion of my research work on ‘Project Innocence’,” he further said.
