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 safeguards designed to ensure that wrongful convictions are avoided, and the overwhelming majority of convictions are accurate determinations of fact, it is clear that wrongful convictions do occur. For decades, public attention focused on the danger of a guilty person going free. Some people question, for example, whether the trade-off created by the exclusionary rule between the loss of probative evidence and the need to regulate police conduct is appropriate.2 Others argue that the courts are too stingy in admitting evidence of other misconduct by a criminal defendant.3 Although these issues can affect the accuracy of factual determinations by the criminal justice system, this article focuses on the other side of the accuracy issue: the danger of convicting a factually innocent person.4 Recent advances in DNA technology and other forensic sciences, along with hard work by lawyers and non-lawyers alike, have focused attention on the danger and reality of convicting an innocent person.5