[For Discussion] What would it look like to crowd-source wrongful conviction research on the Steem blockchain?

Some time back, I received a Facebook friend request from a young woman who I didn't know named Tina D. I looked over her profile and concluded from one of her shared articles that she was probably the daughter of one Valentino Dixon, who I had also never heard of. According to the article, Dixon had been convicted of murder and served decades in prison, but he was seeking to have the conviction overturned. I assumed, therefore, that she had sent me a friend request because I "Like" Facebook pages such as The Innocence Project and The Exoneration Project. I guess it was a decade and a half ago when I started realizing how bad the problem of wrongful convictions is in America, and the subject has become one of my social media interests. So, I accepted her friend request, and I have been following her father's story through her Facebook shares.

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Today, I learned from her Facebook page that her father's conviction has been vacated and after more than 26 years of incarceration, Dixon has been shown to be innocent and freed from prison. (If you read that too fast, let it sink in for a moment - An innocent man experienced more than 26 years of incarceration.)

I also learned that research by a Georgetown undergraduate class helped to set him free. What an amazing experience for a class full of college kids! An exchange student from France was quoted saying,

For the rest of my life it will always be a highlight that I helped an innocent person get exonerated and leave prison, I am so grateful to Georgetown for giving a French exchange student this incredible opportunity.

As truly fantastic as this is, after following this topic for years, I am also painfully aware that many others who deserve the same opportunity as Dixon have not yet received it, and maybe they never will.

Additionally, I also know that a consistent theme with wrongful convictions is that the convicted innocent rarely have the financial wherewithal to pay for the research and representation that are needed to support their claims, so they are usually dependent on pro-bono work from lawyers and researchers.

And I'm thinking to myself that with a technology like Steem, the research doesn't really need to be entirely pro-bono. Could colleges do something like what Temple University did with last semester's @phillyhistory graduate class project? Or could someone set up an account for crowdsourced citizen research initiatives and post research threads for people to comment with research findings on potential cases so that the researchers can be rewarded by use of the upvote mechanism?

I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud, but it seems like Steem could be a powerful mechanism for crowdsourced wrongful conviction research (and other topic areas for that matter), if the community can just figure out the right way to harness it. What do you think? What would it look like to use Steem to help set people free?

Thank you for your time and attention.

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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