What Do We Do?

A photograph from Duke Law of Lamonte Armstrong and his
legal team that helped free him. 

How would you feel if you spent years locked away in a prison cell for a crime you were innocent of committing? Confused, lost, and a little bit fearful of the unknown, just as Lamonte Armstrong felt? Well, Armstrong no longer has to feel that way. Just last July, Lamonte Armstrong was released from prison after being locked up for seventeen years.  In 1998, Armstrong was wrongfully convicted of murdering a university professor after she was found dead in her Greensboro home. Armstrong maintained his innocent throughout the trial-- from the time the police first interviewed him to the his guilty verdict. ONe of the main pieces of evidence against Armstrong was an informant testimony. However, just six years later, the informant himself was charged with a murder (Duke Law). But what can our American criminal justice system do to help stop innocent people like Lamonte Armstrong being wrongly convicted and incarcerated for years? Well, it turns out there are a lot of  simple changes that could potentially help solve the problem. 
       Armstrong's main piece of evidence against him was the informant testimony, however, rarely do people falsely testify without getting something in return; although there are many motivations, most often they do so for money.  Simply not offering compensation an informant's testimony can drastically reduce wrongful convictions caused by false informant testimonies. Another simple change the double-blind administration of police lineups would help prevent false eyewitness identification. A double-blind police lineup is when neither the administrator nor the witness knows the identity of the suspect, and so the administrator cannot influence the witness in any way (National Institute of Justice). Solutions to the problems do ont stop here. There are hundreds of different ways in which our American criminal justice system can reduce the number of wrongful convictions, but why isn't our American criminal justice system implementing these simple changes?