Exonerated Inmates

Kevin Drum has a post up about DNA testing and several commenters have brought up the Innocence Project.

In that vein, let me recommend a very troubling documentary from PBS' Frontline (which has been a major proponent of the Innocence Project) called Burden of Innocence, discussing just how helpless and damaged these men were once they were finally released from prison.

The part that really got me: they don't expunge the criminal records of these exonerated men. Instead they simply add "exonerated", and force the men to explain themselves to potential future employers:

It was a job search conducted, family members say, while bearing the burden of repeatedly having to explain his felony conviction and profess his innocence to skeptical employers. “I don’t believe that anyone really understands what the word ‘exonerated’ means,” Miller says. “I go to a job and fill out the application, I explain to them that I was exonerated, I always get the [look], you know, like, ‘That word, what does that word mean?’ I know that I am not going to be hired by anybody because of the rape I didn’t commit.”

I mean, of all the things we ought to be able to do for these guys (don't get me started on compensation), expunging their records so they can get a job ought to be an obvious and uncontroversial start, right?