Just before Christmas 1994 Betsy Lehman, a 39 year-old prize-winning health reporter for the Boston Globe suddenly and unexpectedly died as she was about to be discharged from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she was being treated for breast cancer. More than 2 months later, during a routine record check, it came to light that she had died from an accidental overdose of the chemotherapy drug she had been receiving. This was particularly shocking as the Dana-Farber is widely regarded one of the world's premier cancer research institutions. Roughly 25 medical staff involved in Ms. Lehman's care could have caught the error, but didn't.

Medicine is practiced by humans and humans make errors. What matters in medicine as in life is how we respond to our errors once they are discovered.

The Dana-Farber responded by publically admitted its mistake, launching a massive investigation of what caused it, and ultimately installing a host of new, more rigorous patient safety procedures. Those procedures have become a model for maximizing patient safety at numerous other hospitals across the country.

As I've noted before, admitting mistakes is not something we are wired to do easily. If possible we nearly always prefer to cover up an error or shift the blame. Yet progress and improvement depends upon learning from our mistakes and to do that you have to admit them. That's how we get better at anything not just hospital care.

Of all the fields that could benefit from admitting its mistakes, law enforcement seems to be the most resistant to doing so. Why is this? People in law enforcement are no different than the rest of us. My hunch is that it is a byproduct of our adversarial justice system, that emphasizes winning rather than unbiased inquiry. For whatever reason, a consequence is that while medical care continually improves its safety record, there is no evidence of any improvement in the rate of false convictions in our legal system. In fact, a recent study of exonerations in one of the world's leading science journals estimated that about 1 in 25 death sentences imposed in the United States is a false conviction. We wouldn't accept this sort of error rate in our mail delivery system but apparently we do in judging our most serious crimes. A little error reduction might be in order.

One particularly egregious example of a refusal to admit error is the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for two murders in Birmingham, Alabama that he didn't commit. He was exonerated and released from prison nearly 30 years later on Good Friday 2015, having become one of the longest-serving, falsely imprisoned individuals in American history.

The case against him was flimsy from the beginning. He had no history of violent crime. There were no witnesses to either murder. No evidence of any kind linking him to the killings was found at either crime scene or in his car or at his home. However, investigators did find a gun, belonging to his mother with whom he shared a house, which was the same caliber as that used in the murders.

The entire case depended on a forensic match between bullets fired from that gun and those recovered at the crime scene. The state's ballistic examiners indeed declared a match and this was enough to convict Hinton and get him sentenced to death.

Hinton never wavered in proclaiming his innocence. In 2002, his new legal team from the Equal Justice Initiative, engaged three of the nation's top firearms examiners, including the former Chief of the FBI's firearms and tool mark unit, to re-examine the ballistics evidence. All three agreed that none of the six bullets were marked with sufficient clarity to match them to the gun in question or with one another for that matter. When asked to explain to these examiners how he had determined the original match to the weapon, the State's expert refused to cooperate.

This could have been the end of the story. The prosecution could have decided to re-examine the evidence themselves or even have dropped all charges because the best experts in the country could not validate their only evidence linking Mr. Hinton to the crimes. But they chose not to. In fact, they fought re-opening the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted unanimously that Mr. Hinton was due a new trial. At that point prosecutors gave up, decided not to re-try him, and he was released.

Let's consider the damage that could have been avoided here. There was the damage to Mr. Hinton, who served 13 more years in hell than he needed to. And there was the lost opportunity to begin an investigation and re-evaluation of the training, competence, and procedures at the state forensic laboratories to help prevent future miscarriages of justice.

Tellingly, another Alabamian exonerated in the same year as Mr. Hinton, Beniah Alton Dandridge, had been also been falsely convicted due to flawed forensic analysis, in this case a mistaken fingerprint identification by the Alabama state forensic lab. Mr. Dandridge had been imprisoned 20 years by then.

Learning how to reduce future errors is one large benefit of admitting one's mistakes. Another benefit is that it allows us to at least partially right-the-wrong by compensating people who are damaged by our mistakes. This is basic fairness, something I think we all agree on. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute reached what the Boston Globe reported to be a multimillion dollar settlement with the family of Betsy Lehman.

But as law enforcement hates to admit error, they also hate to see compensation paid for false convictions, because it is unavoidably a public admission that they had made a mistake.

As the trickle of criminal exonerations in the 1990's turned into a stream in the early 2000's and a flood more recently, 32 states including Alabama passed laws defining the monetary amount due those who were wrongly incarcerated. In Alabama the minimum amount for each year of incarceration was set at $50,000. For Anthony Ray Hinton, that means he is owed a minimum of about $1.5 million. Of course, it is not that simple. The state Committee on Compensation for Wrongful Incarceration and the State Division of Risk Management must both agree that such compensation is really warranted and the State legislature must then appropriate the funds.

In Mr. Hinton's case, both of the appropriate entities have approved payment and State Senator, Paul Bussman (R, Cullman) sponsored a bill in the last legislative session to appropriate the funds. That bill never made it out of committee, however.

Unsurprisingly, state prosecutors, whose approval is thankfully not required, have resisted. Assistant Attorney General James Houts has been vehemently opposed to any compensation for Mr. Hinton, saying that a lack of the ability to match the bullets to the gun "is not evidence of innocence," the presumption of innocence, a core value of our justice system, apparently having slipped his mind.

The legislature is about to reconvene. Senator Bussman, reiterating his view that "if they still think he is guilty, they should re-try him; if not, they need to compensate him," has assured me that reintroducing his compensation appropriation bill will be one of the first things on his agenda for the new session. At a time when Alabama is trying to shed its reputation for racial injustice, after Mr. Hinton has been exonerated for nearly three years, isn't it time for our legislature to do the right thing?

Steven Austad is Chair of the Biology Department at UAB. Before becoming a research scientist, he had various lives as an English major, a newspaper reporter, a New York City taxi driver, and a Hollywood wild animal trainer. Living now in Birmingham with his veterinarian wife, 6 dogs, 2 parrots, and a cat, his column posts every other Saturday morning on AL.com.