"Every day I wake up and still feel like I'm locked up.  I can't make money, can't get my own apartment." —Harry Miller, convicted of robbery despite an airtight alibi, quoted in Deseret News.

In yet another case of justice miscarried, Deseret News reports that a Louisiana man was convicted of a Utah robbery in 2000 and completed 4-1/2 years of his 5 year sentence. But Harry Miller couldn't have committed the robbery— in 2000 he was in Louisiana recovering from a stroke and couldn't walk; he didn't return to Utah until 2002.

Miller has been freed under Utah's 2008 Post Conviction Remedies Act, after appellate attorneys brought independent evidence of Miller's stroke to the Court. But freedom is not the same as acquittal— Miller still has the conviction on his record.

Utah's new law brings hope for wrongfully convicted people doing time here. But virtually every state in the Union has innocents imprisoned— some even on death row.  Author and former attorney John Grisham, in his 2006 book An Innocent Man, wrote, "Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country..."

Laws that allow the innocent to go free are important, but they don't address the underlying problem: our system of justice, longstanding tradition though it is, convicts a frightening number of innocent people.