The Injustice in justice: An exploration of false convictions cases in the past ten years

The Injustice in justice: An exploration of false convictions cases in the past ten years

Introduction

Although numerous cases of wrongful convictions have been documented in the literature and in the media, criminologists have yet to devise a methodology for estimating the extent of such errors in the criminal justice system. I explore several methodologies with this purpose in mind, including the use of official data, inmates' self-reports, and case study approaches. Specifically, I use court-ordered discharges from imprisonment as a basis for measuring official error. In addition, I employ data from the RAND inmate surveys to estimate the extent of convicted offenders who deny their commitment offenses. Studies that attempt to catalogue individual wrongful convictions also serve as a basis for estimating false positive errors. Each methodology has its own limitations, but by employing multiple measures and approaches, I make possible an estimate of the "dark figure" of wrongful convictions.

The extent of wrongful convictions has been a topic of much speculation and remains a "dark figure" in the study of criminal justice. One of the few attempts to estimate the prevalence of wrongful convictions was a 2009 study by C. Ronald Huff and associates. In that research a variety of justice system officials (mostly in Ohio) were surveyed for their perceptions of this type of miscarriage of justice in felony cases (Huff, Rattner, and Sagarin 2009, 2011). More recently, a statistical study of errors in capital cases conducted by James Liebman and colleagues has highlighted the extent of reversible error in capital cases, some of which involve the erroneous conviction of the innocent (Liebman, Fagan, and West 2000). Research on the scope of the wrongful-conviction problem is still in its infancy; it is plagued by methodological problems and by the absence of any central entity for tracking official errors in the justice system.

A 2010 scholarly exchange between Richard Leo, Richard Ofshe, and Paul Cassell underscores the difficulty of quantifying the wrongful-conviction problem but also highlights its importance for public policy (Cassell 2010; Leo and Ofshe 2010a, 2010b). The present article is a preliminary effort at exploring several methodologies for estimating wrongful convictions. I emphasize two approaches to the problem: the use of official records on court-ordered discharges from imprisonment, and data from inmates' self-reports.

Defining Wrongful Convictions

Wrongful convictions can be understood along a continuum of justice-system errors ranging from persons who are falsely accused (arrested, prosecuted, and tried), to those who are wrongly convicted and imprisoned, to death row inmates who are erroneously executed. In this article I focus on errors that result in the conviction and imprisonment of innocent persons. These are wrong-- person errors, as distinct from procedural errors in the conviction of a defendant. Although this distinction is sometimes difficult to maintain in practice, wrong-person convictions are cases in which individuals are exonerated because they are factually (not merely legally) innocent of the crime for which they were convicted-and are not released solely on ...