Kirk Noble Bloodsworth sported a blue silk necktie with the iconic DNA model of a double helix during two talks at the Cornell Law School, April 1. The tie, a Christmas gift from his wife, is far more than window dressing: It symbolizes the key to his freedom.

Bloodsworth was wrongfully imprisoned for nine years, including two years on death row, for a crime he took no part in whatsoever -- the 1984 rape and murder of 9-year-old Dawn Hamilton, in Rosedale, Md.

In 1993, Bloodsworth's case became the first capital conviction overturned based on advanced DNA testing. Astonishingly it would take the Maryland justice system 10 years to enter the same DNA evidence that freed Bloodsworth into a criminal database in order to identify the real killer, Kimberly Ruffner, a convicted rapist -- who was then sentenced to life in 2003.

Bloodsworth's twice-told tale at the law school -- harrowing in the extreme -- is but one of many similar such stories. Since his release, some 126 post-conviction cases have been overturned as a result of DNA testing, eight of those death row cases.

Bloodsworth's story is first and foremost about human death and suffering. But it is also a revelatory tale and an indictment against a "broken criminal justice system" badly in need of reform, said John Terzano, president of The Justice Project, a Washington, D.C., organization that advocates for reform of the American criminal justice system.

Terzano accompanied Bloodsworth, who is now a spokesman for the project. Terzano's work with Bloodsworth and others was instrumental in the passage of the Innocence Protection Act, the first piece of federal death penalty reform legislation Congress signed into law.

"It was the first time that Congress passed a piece of death penalty legislation that didn't take away procedural safeguards but actually added procedural safeguards," said Terzano. "It's the first piece of death penalty legislation that could be called progressive, and we got that through a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president."

Terzano said the social sciences as well as the sciences are catching up with the criminal justice system -- slowly. "Two such areas for reform are improving eyewitness identification procedures and ensuring proper safeguards against bad lawyering on both sides of the aisle."

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide and played a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. Bloodsworth's conviction was based solely on faulty eyewitness testimony. With the help of social scientists in various fields, reforms to the eyewitness identification procedures are under way but not quickly enough, said Terzano.

Areas of eyewitness reforms include: Blind administration, in which the police officer in charge of a photo identification or lineup does not know who the suspect is; lineup composition, where subjects in a suspect lineup should strongly resemble the perpetrator and multiple viewings of lineups with the same suspect should be avoided; police instruction improvements, where the person viewing a lineup should be told that the perpetrator may not be in the lineup, that the investigation will continue regardless of the lineup result and not to look to the administrator for guidance; and statements of confidence -- immediately following the lineup, the eyewitness should provide a statement, in his own words, articulating his level of confidence in the identification.

New Jersey, North Carolina, Wisconsin and several large cities have implemented new procedures and improved the quality of their identifications, according to Terzano.

Bloodsworth's talks were sponsored by the Cornell Law School's Death Penalty Project.