Abstract
Judicial error in preventive prison: People in prison who will never be convicted. Spanish correctional institutions admitted in 2014 more than 8000 people in pretrial detention. Some of them will be absolved after an inquiry and they will be found innocent having spent time in prison. The present study examines cases in which the State, in the interest of public safety, deprives innocent people of freedom. The ultimate purpose of this study is to analyze the possible presence of bias or judicial heuristics in decision-making. To this end, 70 sentences later compensated for wrongful detention and 136 convictions after pretrial detention have been systematically analyzed. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the age, the sex, the nationality, or the criminal records of the innocent and convicts. Nevertheless, differences in the type of crime have been observed. Serious crimes (murder or sexual assault) have been significantly more frequent in compensatory judgments, while the prisoners have been convicted of minor offenses (theft or crimes against road safety). Finally, we discuss the need to conduct research that is generalizable to a target ecology. This will allow study of wrongful convictions both in general and in the application of undue pretrial detention.
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