Illinois will begin teaching police recruits how to avoid wrongful convictions — and some of its teachers are the wrongfully convicted themselves.
On June 30, 1995, Kristine Bunch's trailer home in Indiana went up in flames. Inside was her 3-year-old son Anthony. She couldn't save him. Even worse, the devastated mother was charged with intentionally setting the fire and murdering her child. She was convicted based on an arson investigator's testimony and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Turns out, though, the investigator was wrong — the fire was an accident — and he fabricated evidence. Bunch spent more than 17 years in prison before the truth finally prevailed.
Next month, Bunch will be the first of many to address Illinois police recruits. Her message will be to not make rash judgments about people, explore all possibilities, and avoid tunnel vision.
The director of Illinois' training institute, Mike Schlosser, says recruits will learn about things that traditionally put the innocent in prison: bad eyewitnesses, junk science, jailhouse snitches and more. But being face to face with people who lost decades of their lives may be the most important education.
"When you can see a real human being who experienced something like this, that has the biggest impact on the recruit officers," he explained.
Kristine has shared her story across the US and Canada through innocence projects. She says the trauma of her wrongful conviction will never go away, but what gives her hope is programs like the one in Illinois, showing that people care and want to change things.
"It's realizing that I can take everything that I went through and I can make it better so another person doesn't have to go through with that," she said.
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