Police Misconduct as a Cause of Wrongful Convictions
نویسندگان
چکیده
This study gathers data from two mass exonerations resulting from major police scandals, one involving the Rampart division of the L.A.P.D., and the other occurring in Tulia, Texas. To date, these cases have received little systematic attention by wrongful convictions scholars. Study of these cases, however, reveals important differences among subgroups of wrongful convictions. Whereas eyewitness misidentification, faulty forensic evidence, jailhouse informants, and false confessions have been identified as the main contributing factors leading to many wrongful convictions, the Rampart and Tulia exonerees were wrongfully convicted almost exclusively as a result of police perjury. In addition, unlike other exonerated persons, actually innocent individuals charged as a result of police wrongdoing in Rampart or Tulia only rarely contested their guilt at trial. As is the case in the justice system generally, the great majority pleaded guilty. Accordingly, these cases stand in sharp contrast to the conventional wrongful conviction story. Study of these groups of wrongful convictions sheds new light on the mechanisms that lead to the conviction of actually innocent individuals.
منابع مشابه
Concern about Wrongful Convictions
The wrongful conviction of an innocent person is the worst nightmare to anyone who cares about justice. Eighty years ago, Judge Learned Hand said, “Our procedure has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.”1 The good judge was,as events of the last decade have conclusively proved, simply wrong.Although the criminal justice system has a number of sa...
متن کاملHow the Presumption of Innocence Renders the Innocent Vulnerable to Wrongful Convictions
This article argues, contrary to a straightforward reading, that the presumption of innocence and accompanying principles the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt acts in reality against the interests of those who might be innocent at every stage of the criminal justice process. This is because the „presumption‟, in effect, renders suspects of crime pas...
متن کاملThe Scope of Wrongful Convictions
There is no international consensus as to what constitutes a “wrongful conviction”. The scope of wrongful convictions is contested, with different fields of academic study and different countries adopting different definitions. This multiplicity of definitions exists within the People’s Republic of China (PRC or China). The question of what makes convictions wrongful involves issues of law and ...
متن کاملPotential for False Confession
Recently, an alarmingly high incidence of wrongful convictions has been documented in the United States, in large part because of "Innocence Projects" that use DNA analyses from crime scenes to exonerate innocent persons. The best-known Innocence Project, administered through the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, has helped to free 138 people who had been wrongfully incarcerated. A...
متن کاملAdvancing Wrongful Conviction Scholarship: Toward New Conceptual Frameworks
As wrongful conviction scholarship grows, some scholars have suggested that existing research on miscarriages of justice lacks theoretical grounding and methodological sophistication, arguing that the use of social science theory may help to better understand wrongful convictions. In this article, we suggest that it may be useful to draw upon conceptual frameworks found in traditional criminal ...
متن کامل