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In the summer of 1984, a young girl was kidnapped, raped, and murdered near her home in Baltimore County, Maryland. Twenty-three-year-old Kirk Bloodsworth was accused of the crime, and he was convicted and sentenced to death after a jury trial based largely on the eyewitness testimony of some boys playing near the murder site.

Three days after Bloodsworth’s conviction, police and prosecutors learned about David Rehill. Hours after the girl’s murder, Rehill had shown up at a mental health clinic with fresh scratches on his face and had mentioned to therapists that he was “in trouble with a little girl.” Rehill closely resembled Bloodsworth, who was already on death row. Six months passed before police decided to interview Rehill. Nevertheless, they did not place him in a lineup or doublecheck his alibi.

Due to a technical error in the trial, Bloodsworth was granted an appeal two years after his conviction. Even though prosecutors had known about Rehill for those two years, they withheld this information from the defense until two days before the second trial. Bloodsworth’s attorneys did not have enough time to investigate the new information and failed to ask for a trial postponement. The second jury never learned that there was another suspect, and they also convicted Bloodsworth of rape and murder. In 1993, however, DNA analysis of the victim’s clothing revealed that Bloodsworth could not have committed the crime, and he was exonerated. Trial observers and commentators were disquieted to learn that an innocent man had been sentenced to death.

Kirk Bloodsworth was not the first nor the last capital defendant to receive faulty legal representation, a death sentence, and eventual exoneration through postconviction evidence. In 1993, Gary Gauger was wrongfully convicted of murdering his parents on the basis of a coerced confession obtained by police after he was held for nearly twenty hours of questioning without food or...