Wrongful conviction and exoneration by Lisa Idzikowski

Author:Lisa Idzikowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

How often do innocent people get wrongfully convicted? Some assert that this is unknowable. What is known is that in the past few decades there has been a flood of exonerations. Prominent people in the US justice system say they believe the rate of wrongful conviction is low, but is this true? Researchers contend that in order to make such claims, data are needed to prove this assertion, and that kind of data is not available because a high concentration of exonerated individuals are those facing the death penalty, which only account for a very small percentage of criminal cases. In most criminal cases, there is no follow-up or effort made to seek exoneration.

The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to death. This makes it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences. The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution, but most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply. We use survival analysis to model this effect, and estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.

In the past few decades a surge of hundreds of exonerations of innocent criminal defendants has drawn attention to the problem of erroneous conviction, and led to a spate of reforms in criminal investigation and adjudication. All the same, the most basic empirical question about false convictions remains unanswered: How common are these miscarriages of justice?

False convictions, by definition, are unobserved when they occur: If we know that a defendant is innocent, he is not convicted in the first place. They are also extremely difficult to detect after the fact. As a result, the great majority of innocent defendants remain undetected. The rate of such errors is often described as a “dark figure”—an important measure of the performance of the criminal justice system that is not merely unknown but unknowable.

However, there is no shortage of lawyers and judges who assert confidently that the number of false convictions is negligible. Judge Learned Hand said so in 1923: “Our [criminal] procedure has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.” And in

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