By Kate Bradshaw

Alan Crotzer can list the number of years, months, weeks, days and hours for which he was in prison for a violent crime from which DNA evidence recently cleared him.
He told a captive audience at Downtown St. Petersburg’s Studio@620 last Tuesday that when he was incarcerated in 1981, he figured the justice system would do what it was supposed to do, and he would be cleared. A victim of the crimes of which he was accused – robbery, two counts of rape and kidnapping – had described someone at least seven inches taller and 70 pounds heavier.
He fought for years to have his case looked at, and urged that DNA evidence would set him free.
It wasn’t until he was decades into his sentence that, with the help of the New York chapter of the Innocence Project, DNA evidence that was seemingly miraculously preserved did just that.
Now, he works as an intervention specialist for at-risk youth.
Crotzer is one of 246 people in the US who have been exonerated through DNA evidence.
He spoke as part of a Stetson University College of Law panel titled “Justice Delayed, but not Denied.”
The panel focused on the mission of the innocence project, the systemic problems that result in so many wrongful convictions and the ways in which they can be reformed.
These, panelist and Stetson Law Professor Judith Scully said, include forced or false confessions, suspect misidentification, mishandling of evidence and many others.
So far, eleven people have been cleared of past crimes after being sentenced, and many fear that the number of innocent individuals who are incarcerated may be much larger.
What makes the issue more complex, said panelist Roberta Flowers, also a Stetson law professor, is that DNA evidence isn’t always available, which means that those researching a potentially wrongful imprisonment don’t always have definitive evidence that could free someone who’s wrongfully accused.
Flowers and Scully are co-coordinators of the Stetson chapter of the Innocence project, a nationwide nonprofit that works to free the wrongfully convicted. The Stetson chapter is one of only a few chapters that do not review cases where DNA evidence is available.
Among reform Flowers suggests to help reduce incidences of wrongful conviction are taping confessions, better evidence preservation, utilizing double-blind suspect lineups where the conducting officer does not know who the suspect is and making DNA testing cheaper and more readily available.
Last week, a team of 68 Florida lawyers urged the state Supreme Court to assemble a panel examine why at least 11 Foridians have been wrongfully incarcerated. The panel will likely be called the Florida Innocence Commission, and would be modeled after a similar panel in North Carolina.