The Innocence Project at Twenty: An Interview with Barry Scheck

The late 1980s witnessed the debut of DNA on the stages of the world's judiciaries. In the United Kingdom, DNA “minisatellites” (discovered by Sir Alec Jeffreys and chronicled previously in this series of PLOS Genetics interviews) made their breathtaking appearance in two compelling stories: an immigration case and a double rape-murder case in which a village's entire male population offered up its blood for testing. Meanwhile in the United States, the plodding search for “RFLPs” (restriction fragment length polymorphisms) ultimately gave rise to a set of DNA markers that wended their way into the American courtroom. Directing, producing, and starring in the saga of this transformational technology were a pair of New York lawyers, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, whose relentless efforts and strict adherence to scientific principles have reshaped the landscape of criminal justice far beyond the application of DNA testing.