Is there any meaningful progress being made to reassess our preference for finality over justice?
Not perfect, they can't handle many cases at once and have perhaps been a bit too cautious (to be charitable), but certainly better than nothing.
I should've clarified in my previous comment that I wasn't referring to public opinion and the news cycle when I wrote "a pathway to removal of a false charge of guilt".
My worry is that every time an employer or a government official does a background check on someone who was pardoned for a later-determined-to-be-wrongful conviction yet remains formally marked as guilty, the background check will bring up a misleading record that will tangibly affect the pardoned person's employment opportunities or exercise of legal rights. atmavatar gave some examples (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303300).
This is why I explicitly teach my children that the law is not a moral code. I want them to understand the consequences of breaking the law and act with an understanding of the consequences, but they should follow their own moral code.
I was thinking of this the other day reading about all the patent cases that end up in Texas because it's easy to get biased judges. There are empty offices that the legal system recognizes as the headquarters of hundreds of companies. The justice system cannot handle this abusive "hack", and in general justice is only available to those with several hundred thousand dollars to spare.
So again, why should anyone care whether or not such a system considers a person "guilty".
While we could argue about the merits of doing so for someone who actually committed the crimes for which they were convicted, it seems obvious they should not apply to someone who is innocent of that which they are accused.
I think the problem is that, despite a prisoner's constitutional right to habeus corpus, once you are convicted you no longer have the presumption of innocence.
Add to the fact that the convicted was convicted by a jury of their peers. Therefore, to overturn the conviction, the courts not only have to recognized and acknowledge their own error, they need to overturn the jury's decision. And the system places such a high value on jury decisions that it doesn't treat overturning them lightly.
This means that there is a huge uphill battle to climb. The presumption is that you are guilty, because you were convicted beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. You are no longer in a position of defending against a prosecutor's case where they need to prove you guilty and you have no burden of proof what-so-ever. You are now in a position where you need to prove your innocence.
I'm not sure what the process is like when there is exculpatory evidence. I would hope that as long as the evidence has the slightest hint of merit that the case can be reopened. In the case of the article, however, (which I will readily admit that I didn't study in its entirety since it was pretty TL;DR, so I skimmed and skipped parts) it doesn't sound like there is new exculpatory evidence, it sounds like the DA is unconvinced by the evidence and that if the trial were to occur today, that evidence would have been given much stricter scrutiny than it was at the time. It sounds like we need better ways to rexamine cases when standards of evidence change. To offer a made-up hypothetical, imagine that polygraph tests were admissible at one point and then it was deemed they are unreliable and are no longer admissible, could people who were convicted on polygraph evidence demand an appeal on that ground? I'm not a lawyer so I don't know, but I would hope so.