Perhaps technology’s most extraordinary benefit to liberty has been its impact on exposing and reversing wrongful convictions with the help of DNA testing and other advancements in forensic criminology. Insights into the limitations of eye-witness identification and the refinement of ballistic science, as well as the art of fingerprint analysis, have limited the extent to which verities of the past are uncritically accepted by judges and juries.

We’ve also learned more about the dangers of suggestive interrogation techniques when used against vulnerable witnesses, especially young children. Courts around the nation and in Massachusetts consequently have reviewed and often nullified convictions from our modern equivalent of the Salem witch trials — the prosecutions in the ’80s, including several in the Bay State, of childcare workers accused of ritual and mass sexual abuse against very young children. The junk science proffered by phony child-abuse “experts” to support such outlandish conclusions has finally been turned on its head. Scores of the wrongly convicted — in Massachusetts and elsewhere — have been set free. Given the imperfections of the system, we still need a statewide innocence commission in Massachusetts, but we’ve been successful thus far in staving off Governor Mitt Romney’s myopic “errorless death penalty” initiative.

Perhaps the most important recent liberty issue is the executive-branch attack on the power of the federal courts to protect civil liberties during an age of terror. Curtailed under anti-terrorism legislation during the administration of the “liberal” Bill Clinton, federal courts’ review powers over state and federal convictions were even more drastically limited under the wartime presidency of George W. Bush. This development prompted the federal courts finally to kick back.

While the courts have tried to hold the line, the White House, abetted by a pliant Congress, is now attempting to severely restrict the ancient writ of habeas corpus by which American courts since the 18th century have sought to remedy unlawful imprisonment. It is possible that the voter backlash demonstrated in the recent midterm elections will blunt this trend and push the pendulum back.

The role of the press in charting the ebbs and flows of liberty over 40 years has never been more important than it is today. Early in this period, the press began to assert itself, even taking down Nixon and all the president’s men during Watergate. But long-overlooked powers of federal law, lying in wait like loaded weapons, suddenly sprang to life in the past decade and began to be used with a vengeance by federal prosecutors and judges. Journalists are now almost routinely forced to choose between disclosing sources or going to prison. Newspapers and reporters are threatened with draconian penalties for “espionage,” for reporting official misconduct and violations of the people’s liberties. Witness the New York Times’ courageous and urgent disclosure of unlawful presidential use of the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance, which resulted in a criminal investigation into how the paper got the information, and whether the reporters, editor, and newspaper itself committed a crime in reporting it. But if the past is indeed prologue — as I have come to believe it is — we can count on the pendulum swinging back, but only, of course, if we become energized and activated by the extent of the problem.

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Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins wrote in her 1951 book: “So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion, it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth.” Amen! This has been — and, with luck, will continue to be — the philosophical and political underpinning of the “Freedom Watch” column. After a two-month sabbatical to work on my long-planned book on the Department of Justice, I’ll be back to help launch the Phoenix’s 41st year fighting for truth, justice, and the true American way.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal-defense and civil-liberties attorney, regularly contributes to the Boston Phoenix “Freedom Watch” column.