Alaska could release innocent prisoners. Other states do.

Alaska's criminal justice system prefers to punish the innocent rather than admit a mistake, but we could change that.

Since the 1990s, when lawyers, judges and legislators tired of frivolous lawsuits from prisoners, the law for post-conviction relief tightened to choke off requests for review. I was able to find only one case in the last 20 years, in 2000, in which that process released a prisoner.

In 2015, the Fairbanks Four won release from a factually shaky and racially tainted conviction, but that came about when the state gave up in the face of public opinion. A judge hadn't ruled if the defendants had met the high barrier to proving their innocence.

A few other prisoners were released on direct appeals, before their criminal cases ended.

In my last two columns, I detailed two cases of women imprisoned for decades on dubious evidence. As I explained, the system is working as intended when it holds the finality of decisions as more important than justice.

[Part 1: Unjustly imprisoned for 30 years, Donna Armey can't get Alaska's courts to listen]

[Part 2: Debunked science has kept Suzette Welton in prison for 17 years]

The pressure valve for the courts' unwillingness to release the innocent is executive clemency. The Alaska Constitution says, "Subject to procedure prescribed by law, the governor may grant pardons, commutations, and reprieves, and may suspend and remit fines and forfeitures."

But Alaska's clemency process has been broken for 10 years. Requests for clemency are logged into a file and forgotten without ever being reviewed.

The right of prisoners to have their cases reviewed is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, too, where it is called "habeas corpus." But the Congress restricted that right in an anti-terrorism law in 1996, after the Oklahoma City bombing, and it is largely meaningless for most prisoners, including the two I profiled.

These restrictions came at a time when the flaws in the criminal justice system were becoming more obvious. DNA profiling, invented in the 1980s, began proving conclusively that many convicts who had always said they were innocent were in fact innocent.

Nationally, exonerations have increased almost every year since, first with DNA evidence and now 90 percent of the time for other reasons. Prisoners have been exonerated after spending their entire lives behind bars or while headed to execution.

The National Registry of Exonerations, which is maintained by a consortium of law schools and universities, details the cases of 2,000 Americans exonerated since 1989, including 166 last year alone. Those prisoners lost an average of almost nine years of their lives.

Texas has led the way in addressing these injustices. Although known for its law-and-order politics and high rate of executions, Texas also was scrupulous about retaining old evidence, and that led to a lot of DNA exonerations. As exonerations mounted, political pressure mounted to do something about it.

The state of Texas now offers falsely convicted inmates compensation of $80,000 for each year they spend in prison. Some other states offer $50,000.

Alaska offers nothing. The Alaska State Senate didn't act on a bill to give the Fairbanks Four even the Alaska Permanent Fund dividends they lost while in prison.

More importantly, district attorneys in Dallas and several other counties in Texas formed Conviction Integrity Units to review claims of innocence. More than 25 counties around the country have followed. Those units now account for more than half of exonerations.

Paul Cates of the nonprofit Innocence Project, in New York, said the Dallas and Brooklyn integrity units are effective because prosecutors and defense attorneys work together to investigate claims. Stepping beyond the adversarial process allows attorneys to see cases in new ways.

But power remains with the district attorney, who must decide whether or not to give up a conviction (a judge also has to agree, but normally does when both sides favor exoneration).

"It does require a DA who is willing to acknowledge that the system is not infallible, that mistakes can be made. And if you don't have that, it is just a waste of time," Cates said.

John Skidmore, chief of the Criminal Division for Alaska's Attorney General, said attorneys already review old cases when prisoners claim innocence. Having lost 19 positions over the last three years, he said creating a Conviction Integrity Unit is not a priority.

But Bill Oberly, of the Alaska Innocence Project, said a unit would not need full-time staff, because the number of cases in Alaska is so small. A team could meet to review cases when necessary.

The savings could be huge. It costs about $40,000 a year to hold a prisoner in Alaska. Trench warfare in post-conviction litigation is expensive, too. Suzette Welton has fought in court for four years to get the $14,000 needed to have a fire science expert review the evidence in her case.

North Carolina has a statewide Innocence Inquiry Commission, the only state agency in the country taking an independent look at old cases. The commission has representatives of crime victims as well as prosecutors and defense attorneys.

When the commission takes a case, staff investigates whether the person really committed the crime, not the procedural details that hang up the courts. When it decides a prisoner is innocent, the commission takes the case before a panel of judges. That process has worked, with eight exonerations so far.

But Alaska is far short of having such a solution. We don't even have the basic solution our constitution calls for, executive clemency.

I looked into clemency after I understood the low chances and long years ahead of Donna Armey and Suzette Welton in their quests for exoneration. Gov. Bill Walker seems like the kind of man who would use his power to resolve an injustice.

But no clemency requests have reached Walker's desk. Neither of his two predecessors acted on one, either.

The last governor to act on clemency was Frank Murkowski. In 2006, as he was leaving office, he issued several questionable pardons.

The worst was Murkowski's pardon of a construction company convicted of negligently killing a worker. The company had hired former legislators as lobbyists to contact the governor. Murkowski granted the pardon without talking to his staff, the Attorney General, or the victim's family.

In response to the scandal, the Legislature passed a law in 2007 requiring a 120-day review period by the Parole Board and notification of victims before the governor can use his or her constitutional clemency power.

Apparently, the process for that review was never created. The Parole Board accepts requests for clemency, but merely puts them in a file. Its website has long said the process "is being revised" and that applicants will be notified at an undetermined point in the future when it is ready.

I asked the board, the Department of Law and the governor's office. No one could clarify the situation. When I asked Walker if he knew that exoneration requests were not reaching him, an aide stopped the interview before he could answer, saying the Department of Law is reviewing the issue.

After spending time talking to these women who, in my opinion, obviously should not be in prison, learning about the legal process that won't consider the justice of their situations, and finding out politicians don't care enough to read petitions for mercy, I am angry and frustrated.

I have several attorneys in my family and grew up respecting the law, but studying these cases and reading articles and studies about the American courts' systemic failures, I've lost faith in the criminal justice system.

The courts fail to correct recurring errors such as the use of junk forensic science. They allow everyday mistakes by lawyers to become irreversible punishments for defendants. And judges and lawyers make plenty of mistakes. Mistakes are all through the record of these cases.

No other process that takes lives would be allowed to work so poorly. But most defendants are poor and uneducated and can't speak for themselves. Besides, most of us assume they're guilty as soon as they're arrested, and who cares about criminals rights?

Alaska politicians don't care. They could improve the system, as in other states. They could read requests for clemency. They could save money by ending senseless punishments.

And with each year that passes, these women lose more of their lives. Parents die, children grow up, the opportunity to have a family passes by.

The waste is intolerable, and the blame belongs to those who could help them but instead turn away.

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