This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 23rd,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown. In opposing the nomination of an attorney for a

federal judge ship some US senators, all attorneys themselves, appear to betray a stunning

lack of knowledge about how the criminal justice system actually works.

Cato's Clark Neely comments.

Let's start with some basic background here. Who is Nina Morrison?

Nina Morrison is a senior attorney at the Innocence Project where she and her

colleagues try to exonerate people using DNA evidence, people who have been

falsely convicted of crimes they did not commit.

Now let's be clear about what the Innocence Project, like the sort of Raison detra of the innocence project is to

discover who was falsely convicted and using a technique that developed in, I believe, the 1980s, DNA evidence to exonerate those people.

And they're up to kind of a stunning number of people that have been exonerated through DNA evidence.

Yeah, about 300 people.

The Innocence Project has exonerated using DNA and other scientific techniques so that there's really virtually no doubt about the

innocence of the people whom they have exonerated and it's a it's a horrifying statistic

particularly when you understand just how much effort our system puts into

discouraging that kind of post-conviction exoneration so we know to a certainty that this is merely the tip of a very large

iceberg. So there has been pushback and from a few Republicans, notably Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton, of Arkansas and Josh

Holly of Missouri, they are critical of her, and I believe at least one of those senators used the

phrase soft on crime.

And this was in, if I'm not mistaken, direct relation to her work getting the, again, wrongfully imprisoned out of prison.

You know, it's not entirely clear.

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