Wrongful Convictions
Wrongful convictions occur when individuals are found guilty of crimes they did not commit, often leading to severe injustices that can include long prison sentences or even death row. The rise of DNA testing and scientific advancements has unveiled the extent of this issue, demonstrating that many innocent people remain incarcerated due to systemic failures in the criminal justice system. Major contributing factors to wrongful convictions include eyewitness misidentification, unreliable forensic evidence, false confessions, misconduct by authorities, and inadequate legal representation. Organizations like the Center on Wrongful Convictions and the Innocence Project work to identify and rectify these misjudgments, advocating for reforms to prevent future errors and providing legal support to those wrongfully accused. The National Registry of Exonerations has documented over two thousand cases since 1989, highlighting an alarming rate of exonerations in recent years. The discussion around reparations for those wrongfully convicted is ongoing, with many states enacting compensation laws to acknowledge the profound impact of these injustices. This complex landscape continues to challenge perceptions of fairness and efficacy within the justice system, prompting calls for critical reforms.
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Wrongful Convictions
When the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) opened in 1998 at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, wrongful convictions were considered rare exceptions in an otherwise efficient and fair criminal justice system. Since then, however, DNA testing and other scientific advances have revealed that many innocent people are languishing in prisons and on death row across the United States. Only a small percentage of criminal cases produce biological evidence subject to DNA testing, and even that evidence is often lost or destroyed. Still, many people do not have access to definitive tests like DNA and have a small chance of proving their innocence. According to the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, other causes of wrongful convictions include eyewitness misidentification, improper forensic science, false confessions, government misconduct, unreliable informants, and incompetent lawyers.
Overview
Wrongful convictions have peppered the US criminal justice system with many notorious cases grabbing media attention. In 1987 a Williamson County, Texas, court found Michael Morton guilty of murdering his wife, Christine. He spent twenty-five years in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him. The West Memphis Three—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley—spent eighteen years in prison for the murders of three eight-year-old boys in 1993. In 2007 DNA analysis raised serious questions about their guilt, but the state of Tennessee refused to exonerate them. In 2011 a new judge ordered an evidentiary hearing and the West Memphis Three reluctantly agreed to Alford pleas (form of guilty plea in which the defendant asserts his or her innocence) in exchange for time served. They vowed to fight the convictions and prove their innocence while prosecutors and police continued to insist on their guilt.
Since 1998 the Center on Wrongful Convictions has been one of the leaders of a nationwide movement to identify and rectify wrongful convictions and other serious miscarriages of justice. The center focuses on representation, research, and reform, receiving approximately 200 letters a month from prisoners around the country requesting lawyers. The center also specializes in representing wrongfully convicted youth and women, and its research focuses on identifying problems with the criminal justice system. It helped create the National Registry of Exonerations, a database providing detailed information about the more than two thousand exonerations in the United States since 1989. Data from the registry shows that there have been about forty-five to sixty-six exonerations each year in the early twenty-first century.
Other causes of wrongful convictions noted by the center include erroneous eyewitness identification, false and coerced confessions, official misconduct, inadequate legal defense, false forensic evidence, incompetent lawyers, perjury, and incentivized testimony. The Innocence Project website states that the criminal justice system must be reformed to address the fundamental system flaws that lead to wrongful convictions.
The Michigan Innocence Clinic, the first clinic of its kind to produce exonerations without DNA, cites eyewitness misidentification as the single greatest nationwide cause of wrongful convictions. Like any other crime scene evidence, witness memory must be carefully preserved and methodically retrieved or it can be contaminated. Forensic testing is a valuable tool in assessing evidence but at times forensic analysts have reported findings without a proper scientific basis and some have reported fraudulent results. In some cases innocent people make false confessions, believing that confessing will benefit them more than maintaining their innocence, or they are trying to protect someone else. In some cases, government officials manufacture or misconstrue evidence to ensure that a defendant is convicted, and people have been wrongfully convicted in cases where informants have been paid to testify or receive other benefits in return for their testimony.
An area of ongoing debate surrounding exoneration is the practice of providing reparations to those who were wrongfully convicted. By 2015, compensation legislation had been enacted in thirty states as well as the District of Columbia. Each state sets its own criteria for and forms of remuneration, and often considers such factors as the length of time served or the receipt of pardon when determining eligibility. The Innocence Project reported in 2009 that more than 240 individuals had been cleared through post-conviction DNA analysis, and of them, nearly two-thirds had been compensated. Proponents of reparations argue that not only does the state owe a debt to the innocent individual for the physiological, psychological, and financial impact of incarceration, but that the financial repercussions of wrongful conviction will spur improvement within the justice system. Opponents fear that reparations may become burdensome for the state and that concern over wrongful conviction could lead to reluctance to prosecute the guilty.
Bibliography
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"The Issues." Innocence Project, innocenceproject.org/the-issues/. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.
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