The Importance Of Wrongful Convictions

INTRODUCTION

During the past twenty years reports have shown cases where people had been wrongfully convicted and exonerated in murder and rape cases. Many exonerations occurred during post-conviction and DNA tests have revealed the innocence of wrongfully convicted individuals (Leo & Gould, 2009). Over 230 prisoners have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing and many wrongful convictions had proved their innocence without DNA (Leo & Gould, 2009).

Before 1989, the first year to use post-conviction DNA testing was used to establish innocence (Leo & Gould, 2009). The University of Michigan Law School and Center for Wrongful Convictions reported over 2,000 wrongful convictions who been exonerated for the past twenty years. There were 873 exonerations, 416 of those were homicide cases, 203 were sexual assault, 203 child sex abuse, 58 non-violent crimes, 47 robberies and 47 for

Wrongful convictions can occur from incentivized testimony, false confessions, eyewitness identification error, bad lawyering, government misconduct and faulty forensic science. Around sixty percent of wrongful convictions that used forensic science involved improper testimony.

FURTHER EXAMINATION

Leo & Gould (2009) discuss social science approaches to researching wrongful conviction and argue those methods would help to better understand the causes, characteristics, and the consequences of wrongful convictions. Judson (2017) mentions further examination is needed for recognizing the problem that wrongful conviction can occur, but they have specific causes that can be addressed and in order to defeat the known causes of wrongful conviction and ensure accurate testimony in prosecutions it is very important to limit bias in investigation and prosecution of cases (Judson,