Why We Don’t See Race: How Australia Has Overlooked Race as an Influence on Miscarriages of Justice

Abstract

While criminal justice systems are increasingly prepared to identify and overturn wrongful convictions, the focus of limiting errors has centered upon commonly accepted “causal factors” of wrongful conviction. Importantly, there has been limited work that has explored the question of who is most vulnerable to fall victim to this error. We explore three landmark case studies highlighting wrongful convictions in Australia where race, racialized policing, or racism were crucial yet unresolved issues leading to an erroneous conviction. These cases and the absence of resolutions of these racialized issues in these convictions typify the inadequacies of Australian approaches to wrongful conviction. We argue that to achieve justice in Australia we must not be limited to the causal factors that have come to define American innocence and should support greater acknowledgment of how race and ethnicity influence wrongful conviction.