Post-Conviction DNA Testing and Wrongful Conviction

Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science

There has been an explosion of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions in the last decade, reflecting a growing concern about the problem of actual innocence in the criminal justice system. Yet criminal law and procedure scholars have engaged in relatively little dialogue or collaboration on this topic with criminologists. In this article, we use the empirical study of wrongful convictions to...

“It Never, Ever Ends”: The Psychological Impact of Wrongful Conviction

Mckithen v. Brown: Due Process and Post-conviction Dna Testing

When the Second Circuit decided McKithen v. Brown, it joined an ever-growing list of courts faced with a difficult and pressing issue of both constitutional and criminal law: is there a federal constitutional right of post-conviction access to evidence for DNA testing? This issue, which sits at the intersection of new forensic technologies and fundamental principles of constitutional due proces...

Legal Risk, Legal Evidence and the Arithmetic of Criminal Justice

It is argued that the standard way that the criminal justice debate regarding the permissible extent of wrongful convictions is cast is fundamentally flawed. In particular, it is claimed that there is an inherent danger in focussing our attention in this debate on different ways of measuring the probabilistic likelihood of wrongful conviction and then evaluating whether these probabilities are ...

Lineup Construction and Lineup Fairness

1. Introduction. Police lineups come from English criminal law and procedure. According to Devlin (1976), lineups were instituted through a Middlesex magistrate's order in the mid 19 th century. They were intended as a 'fair' replacement for the practices of courtroom identification, and showups, which were widely used in 19 th century England, but widely recognized as potentially unfair to the...