Source: post-gazette.com 1/26/25
Daniel Carnevale spent 13 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit — after a devastating fire in Bloomfield that claimed three lives, he was convicted of second-degree murder and arson.
He’d been arrested over a decade after the tragedy, when a witness claimed he’d seem him at the building watching the fire, even though the police reports on the night of the fire said the witness had not seen the person’s face.
According to the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, though the report from the ATF and parts of the police file had been lost, the Pittsburgh police “did not begin the investigation anew, but instead took previous investigators’ conclusions and assumptions as fact.”
The investigators accepted the belief that it was arson — it was later proven not to be — though the scientific techniques had advanced in the years since the fire. They didn’t reinterview suspects or witnesses and in particular didn’t check Carnevale’s alibi (the police had not checked it at the time).
Though the prosecution fought against reopening the case, the case collapsed under the weight of these new findings, leading to his release in 2020. This tragic miscarriage of justice would have persisted indefinitely without the work of the Innocence Project and the prosecutors’ courage and resources to admit errors and seek the truth.
‘Qualified Immunity’ is the reason why many prosecutors and law enforcement abuse and break the law and it is a stipulation that should never have been endoctrinated and by all means, eliminated.
Yes! I’ll raise a glass and toast to this very line of thinking! They should not be afraid to admit when they were wrong and that the procedures were incorrect and inappropriate.
They’re already allowed to admit they were wrong. They simply refuse to. It’s a byproduct of a system that prioritizes conviction rates, years sentenced, and politics over fairness, justice, and common sense.