The bill now goes to the full N.C. Senate. As to differences between the House and Senate version,
The Senate version would bar defendants who pleaded from going before the commission, which the House bill would permit. And while the House would allow a split decision of a three-judge panel to be appealed to the state Supreme Court, there is no such provision in the Senate bill and provides for no additional appeals.
Here is the mission statement of the N.C. Innocence Commission.
Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School explain why we need innocence commissions in the U.S:
Major mishaps - environmental disaster, wrongful death, hospital malpractice, etc. - are subjected to a comprehensive investigation in nearly every institution involved with public health and safety. When an airplane crashes or a train derails, the National Transportation Safety Board ("the NTSB") immediately conducts an investigation into the causes of the incident and makes recommendations to prevent further harm from occurring. Since the primary purpose of the NTSB is to protect the public safety, it will sometimes issue safety recommendations before its investigation of a crash is complete. Agencies like the NTSB are effective because they are equipped with subpoena power, great expertise, and real independence, allowing them to ask and find answers to the important and obvious questions: What went wrong? Was it systemic error or an individual's mistake? Was there any official misconduct? What can be done to correct the problem and prevent it from happening again?
Wrongful convictions of the innocent are the American criminal justice system's equivalent of a major catastrophe. The guilty are not punished, the innocent are imprisoned or sentenced to death, and the real perpetrators remain free to commit more crimes. Still, when an innocent person is exonerated by DNA testing or other evidence, our justice system has no institutional mechanism to evaluate and address the causes of that wrongful conviction.
In order to effectively address the recurring, institutional problems that contribute to the conviction of the innocent, states should create innocence commissions to monitor, investigate, and address errors in the criminal justice system. When a wrongful conviction occurs, these commissions should be empowered to undertake a comprehensive review of the system's failures, and ask: What went wrong? Was it systemic error or an individual's mistake? Was there any official misconduct? What can be done to correct the problem and prevent it from happening in the future?
Their more detailed statement on innocence commissions is here (pdf).
