The Major Sections Of Wrongful Convictions

“It is difficult to prove a causal relationship between permissible investigative and interrogatory deception and testimonial deception.  Police freely admit to deceiving suspects and defendants.  They do not admit to perjury, much less to the rationalization of perjury.  There is evidence, however of the acceptability of perjury as a means to the end of conviction.  The evidence is limited and fragmentary and is certainly not dispositive” (Skolnick, 1982).

Despite the efforts of the courts and law enforcement agencies to improve the handling of eyewitness testimony, misidentifications continue to be a major contributing factor to false convictions. The Innocence Project is a national litigation and public policy organization that has been dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing. Since their inception in 1992, they have helped overturn 311 wrongful convictions in the United States, as of the date of this paper. Of those 311 cases, they have determined that misidentification has contributed to approximately 73% of those wrongful convictions ("The Innocence Project"). That is an extremely high percentage, and something needs to be done about this.

Wrongful convictions are common in the court-system. In fact, wrongful convictions are not the rare events that you see or hear on televisions shows, but are very common. They stem from some sort of systematic defect that lead to wrongful convictions such as, eyewitness misidentification testimony, unvalidated or improper forensic science, false confessions and incriminating statements, DNA lab errors, false confessions, and informants (2014). Bringing awareness to all these systematic defects, which result in wrongful, is important because it will better adjust the system to avoid making the same mistakes with future cases. However, false confession is not a systematic defect. It does not occur because files were misplaced or a lab technician put one too many drops. False confessions occur because of some of psychological attempt to protect oneself and their family. Thus, the courts responsibility should be to reduce these false confessions.

This paper takes a leap into the corrupted side of the criminal justice system. After analyzing several articles regarding wrongful conviction cases in the Unites States, it is apparent that wrongful conviction cases occur more often than society believed. It has come to surface in recent years that wrongful convictions are a big problem with our criminal justice system. Researchers have discovered the causes of wrongful convictions to be bad lawyering, government misconduct, informants, false confessions, flawed forensic science and eyewitness error. Furthermore, this paper explores the affects victims face due to a wrongful conviction. As society has begun to steadily realize that miscarriage of justice is a possibility, researchers have considered reforms to the criminal justice system.

Confessions have become one of the most valued pieces of evidence in the criminal justice system. What many people, including jurors, may not know is that the process to obtain a confession can vary greatly. Many confessions can be coerced by very abnormal and dangerous situations. A prime example of a suggestive interrogation with a false confession comes from the documentary titled Murder on a Sunday Morning. Alongside, the analysis of the confession given in this documentary will be the critical analysis of three separate academic articles with findings that could have better served the defendant of this case.

Determining a false confession proves difficult due to the multitude of dimensions involved. According to Kassin and Wrightsman’s (1985) survey of the literature, there are three main types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized. Unlike coerced false confessions, voluntary false confessions arise as a result of someone willingly turning themselves into the police with an account of their crime (McCann, 1998). Voluntary false confessions can result from multiple motives, including an internalized need for punishment or to save someone else’s face. In contrast, coerced false confessions directly result from police interrogations. While coerced-compliant confessions are made to avoid interrogation, escape the stressful situation, or achieve some other reward, coerced-internalized confessions emerge when a suspects begins to

When questioning witnesses of a crime, detectives may choose a specific technique; one technique is the Reid Technique. The Reid Technique is a multi-step questioning method that pressures the witnesses or the accused to admit to the crime. It is used in North America. According to Professor Brent Snook, a psychologist at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, the Reid Technique is “Starsky and Hutch”, where two hot head detectives “beat up” their suspects to encourage them confess (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/25/youre-guilty-now-confess-false-admissions-put-polices-favourite-interrogation-tactic-under-scrutiny/). This paper will examine the steps of the Reid Technique, as well as reveal substantial evidence that this technique should be banned. This technique has led to false confessions. Not only does this mean that someone has been punished that isn’t guilty, but it also means the real criminal has not been found and punished. The arguments against the use of this technique are the following:

Police interrogate suspects on a daily basis, but how can they tell if the confession is real? We have all heard, at one time or another of someone confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Then your next thought is “I would never confess to something I didn’t do”. The only way you can be a 100% sure of that is if you have been through an interrogation before. This paper is going to define “confession” and tell how an innocent person will confesses to a crime they didn’t commit. This paper will also show the history of interrogations.

“Wrongful convictions happen every week in every state in this country. And they happen for all the same reasons. Sloppy police work. Eyewitness identification is the most- is the worst type almost. Because it is wrong about half the time. Think about that.” (Grisham). Wrongful convictions can happen to anyone, at anytime. Grisham implies wrongful convictions happen for the same reasons, careless police work as well as eyewitness identification. An eyewitness identification is a crucial aspect in detective work because it essentially locates the person at the crime scene. This is the worst cause of wrongful convictions because it is wrong half the time.

With the number of DNA exonerations growing in the recent years, wrongful convictions reveal disturbing trends and fissures in the justice system. It shows how broken the system is, and why it needs urgent fixing. According to Huff (1996), over ten thousand people are convicted wrongfully for serious crimes each year. This study established that factors leading to wrongful convictions are false eyewitnesses, a prejudiced jury, incompetent prosecutors, and suspects’ ignorance. Where DNA evidence clears a suspect, array of reasons emerge; misconduct, mistakes, to race and class factors. It is important to make DNA data available to attorneys in order to enable them mount a strong

Every time an innocent person is exonerated based on DNA testing, law enforcement agencies look at what caused the wrongful convictions. There are many issues that contribute to putting guiltless lives behind bars including: eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, imperfect forensic science, and more (Gould and Leo 18). When a witness is taken into a police station to identify a suspect, it is easy for their memories to be blurred and their judgment influenced. This can lead the witness to identify a suspect who is actually innocent. Flawed forensic science practice also contributes to wrongful imprisonments. In the past, analysts have been inaccurate due to carelessness, testified in court presenting evidence that was not based

The topic of wrongful convictions will be discussed in this research paper. Wrongful conviction is defined as the conviction of a person who is accused of a crime in which, in the result of subsequent investigation, proves erroneous. These persons who are in fact innocent, will be wrongly convicted by a jury or a court of law.

According to Forrest and Woody (2010), “False-evidence ploys raise particular concerns in the social science community because false-evidence ploys increase the likelihood of false confession in laboratory studies” (p. 9). Utilizing deception and trickery to gain false confessions from suspects will hinder an officer’s ethical decision making; furthermore, it can also create a lack of trust and confidence between the police and community they serve. When utilizing false-evidence ploys, there will be primary and secondary costs to society. False confessions are the primary cost for wrongful-imprisonment, and the wrongfully accused must suffer years or even decades of incarceration (Forrest & Woody, 2010). False confessions will also effect the community because the actual offender is still at large as police officers failed to apprehend the actual offender after a suspect untruthfully confesses (Forrest & Woody, 2010). The secondary costs of false-evidence ploys affect the legal system and society in various ways. First, deceptions that police officers utilize during interrogations could easily cause officers to lie in court proceeding, magistrates and internal affair detectives (Forrest & Woody, 2010). Secondly, deception will escalate anger in perpetrators who has been deceived and in return they will respond with great aggression and violence (Forrest & Woody, 2010). In order to prevent the aforementioned effects of false-evidence ploys, “defense attorneys should attempt to introduce an expert witness in the area of false confessions to educate jurors about the little-known, manipulative, and potentially deceptive nature of police interrogation” (Forrest & Woody, 2010, p.

When was the last time you have mistaken someone’s identity? What did the last person in class have on today? Wrongful convictions may begin during the investigative process. Police misconduct or mistaken eyewitness testimony can ruin the rest of a person’s life. The criminal justice system can be changed to prevent the latter by reforming the type of evidence allowed to be used when convicting a person. Most cases of wrongful conviction are either police initiated, which begin with the assumption that a specific person is guilty, or witness initiated, which contains an articulate eyewitness testimony.