Innocence Movement Research Articles

En busca del reenvío perdido: Un análisis crítico de la solución prevista para la impugnación de la sentencia condenatoria en el Código Procesal Penal Federal de la República Argentina

This article presents a normative argument against the ban on retrial in the appellate stage in the Federal Criminal Procedure Code of the Argentine Republic. According to the article, this rule results in only factually innocent appellants being able to seek a review after conviction. The rationale behind the article bonds this rule with the phenomenon of Innocentrism and the defense of actual innocence as the primary value of the criminal process. To this end, the article analyses both the representative literature of the Innocence Movement and its reform proposals, and the critiques of these. With this theoretical framework, the article argues that a series of values identified with the concept of legal innocence and due process do not receive due attention in the appellate stage in the Federal Criminal Procedure Code of Argentina. Lastly, the article posits that the provision of retrial would broaden the possibilities for adequate resolution for different cases of injustice in the criminal process.

‘Angry and heartbroken for the failure of the system’

As the number of wrongful conviction media productions released to the public increases, an understanding of their potential impact on viewers is prudent. One such production, When They See Us, depicts the wrongful conviction of five racialized youth, and we investigated the effect of watching this specific wrongful conviction media production on a subset of Reddit users’ online conversations about wrongful convictions and the criminal justice system in general. Following an inductive content analysis of Reddit comments shared to r/WhenTheySeeUs (N = 461), seven coding categories were observed. The ‘Wrongful Conviction Relevant’ coding category was the third most frequently occurring, representing 28% of total comments. Additionally, after conducting a deeper thematic analysis of the ‘Wrongful Conviction Relevant’ comments, the following themes and subthemes were identified: Risk Factors (Individual Characteristics and System Factors), Exoneration and Beyond (Impacts on Exonerees and Changes to System), and the Innocence Movement (Unmet System Expectations and Public Awareness). Users’ ‘Wrongful Conviction Relevant’ comments were situated within the academic literature investigating wrongful conviction correlates, outcomes, and preventative measures, and discussed in relation to viewer reactions to other wrongful conviction media productions.

Barred: Why the Innocent Can't Get out of Prison

For three decades, the innocence movement has focused on proving “factual innocence” with DNA evidence. Substance. But as Professor Medwed details, far more people are wrongly convicted than those who can rely on exculpatory DNA evidence. DNA has been crucial to exposing the many causes of wrongful convictions: faulty forensic evidence, police and prosecutor misconduct, mistaken eyewitnesses, unreliable informants, false confessions, and racism. DNA opens the doors to recognizing these other causes of wrongful convictions. But what next?
 Barred walks us through the procedural bars and barriers at each step a wrongly convicted person takes toward freedom. As Medwed describes it, “the rule regime is stacked against the innocent, contrary to the popular belief that the postconviction process is full of escape hatches from the prison cell, those imaginary ‘technicalities’ that let people loose…. You can have evidence of innocence – and no one willing to hear it.”
 Through the pages of Barred, Medwed turns us to procedure for the next stage of innocence work. If it is procedure that creates the bars, then it is those bars we must bend to free innocent people.

Conceptions and degrees of innocence: the principles, pragmatics, and policies of the innocence movement

ABSTRACT Over the last few decades, the innocence movement in the United States and the United Kingdom has contributed to the correction of many hundreds of mistaken convictions. Complacency about the accuracy of convictions has been displaced by ‘innocence consciousness’. The movement has highlighted underlying problems with the criminal justice process, giving impetus for reform. However, the innocence movement has traditionally had a confined focus, excluding defendants convicted of murder who actually killed accidentally, and sexual assault defendants where the complainant actually did consent. These exclusions appear to be the product of pragmatism rather than principle. They make it easier to achieve exoneration, and tell a story that is simpler and more palatable. However, these restrictions potentially create policy blind spots. The current challenge for the maturing movement is to be conscious of, and seek to overcome, these limitations.

Measuring Innocence

What is the rate of wrongful conviction? This question may be implicit in Blackstone’s ratio: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Scholarship designed to provide an empirical answer, however, emerged only with the rise of the “innocence movement” in the United States. This article does not provide another study estimating the rate of wrongful felony conviction either for a specified sample, such as death sentences within a specified time period, or for an entire jurisdiction. Instead, we evaluate the rate question itself and assess its importance to innocence scholarship and action. We first trace the question’s intellectual lineage, and its historical and ideological roots among innocence believers and innocence skeptics. We then describe and evaluate all or most of the published studies attempting to estimate the wrongful conviction rate. Next, we discuss a reoccurring limitation of this published work, namely, its failure to account for or its unsubstantiated assumptions about guilty pleas and misdemeanor convictions among innocent defendants. Finally, we question the continued importance of the rate question in light of the modern innocence movement and its growing accomplishments.

Framing innocence: an experimental test of the effects of wrongful convictions on public opinion

Discourse about criminal justice in the USA increasingly revolves around wrongful convictions. Research has documented the emergence of the “innocence frame,” but relatively little is known about its effects on public opinion. We utilize framing theory to examine how various presentations of wrongful conviction information affect attitudes toward the justice system and highlight the consequences of the innocence movement for public opinion. We implement two survey experiments to test the effects of innocence information for criminal justice attitudes. In the first experiment, we test the impact of wrongful conviction numbers relative to a control group for death penalty support. In the second experiment, we analyze the effects—both separately and jointly—of exoneration numbers and a wrongful conviction narrative relative to a control group for attitudes toward the death penalty and police reform, trust in the justice system, and personal concern. We demonstrate that the presentation of factual numbers of exonerations reduces support for capital punishment and erodes trust in the justice system, but fails to garner support for police reforms or increase personal concern about wrongful convictions. However, a narrative about an individual wrongful conviction predictably has more pronounced effects on death penalty attitudes and increases personal concern and support for police reform, but has little effect on trust in the justice system more broadly. Wrongful convictions are consequential for public opinion, but the effects are contingent on how the information is framed and the attitudinal outcome of interest. Our findings have implications for criminal justice attitudes and policy, the innocence movement, and framing theory.

Book Review: Robert J. Norris, Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement

Book Review: Robert J. Norris, Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement

Book Review: Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement

Book Review: Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement

Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement

Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement

The Anti-Blackstonians

The writings of four authors — Daniel Epps, Larry Laudan (writing alone and with Ronald J. Allen) and Paul G. Casell — related to the Blackstone principle or the Blackstone ratio are analyzed and criticized herein. Their writings are labeled anti-Blackstonian because in my view view their programs would (1) seriously weaken defendants’ rights, (2) not reduce wrongful convictions, and (3) not enhance public safety. This critique is written from the context of the innocence movement, analyses of criminologists related to the Blackstone ratio, and a deeply flawed criminal justice system.

Review and Concept Paper; Norris, Robert J., 2017; Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement.

The most salient theme of the book is that the Innocence Movement represents one piece of a broader historical and contemporaneous social reform perspective in the pursuit of social and legal justice. The movement cannot be seen in isolation, but is historically part of the movements for social justice rising from the civil rights era and the Earl Warren procedural due process era at the US Supreme Court. And besides the history of the roots in social justice movements, the study of wrongful convictions reveals important contemporaneous issues of criminal justice reform, as well as broader social issues, beyond the “narrow confines of innocence.” “All of the factors that impact what we see in criminal justice also affect wrongful convictions; race class gender, politics, and moral emotions all impact the extent to which people receive justice.” And, further, a study of the legal system and justice itself is an important lens to view larger social problems. The interviewees confirm this. “…Criminal Justice will always tell you a good amount about what is wrong with your society, about what is wrong with your culture…” The issue of prison reform is made even more palatable and enhanced by the fact that in addition to suffering deplorable conditions and abuse in prison, it is happening to undeserving innocent persons. And, beyond prison issues, wrongful convictions allow you to see “fundamental issues like race, authority, and the relationship between citizen and state” more clearly… Debates over the war on drugs and mass incarceration …are intimately tied to conversations about race, class, families, and neighborhoods.” As evidence of the broad reach of the Innocence movement, Norris perceptively suggests that the innocence movement was invigorated by the tough on punishment policies, “punitive turn” because more persons were severely affected. Another nexus of the social and historical connections of the Innocence Movement is its connection with Death Penalty Abolition discussed in chapter 2 of the book. The connection between Innocence, Exonerations and the Death Penalty is not only an important theme of this book, but is a main issue in the study of the innocence movement, as further discussed below.

Book Review: Daniel Medwed, Ed., Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: Twenty-Five Years of Freeing the Innocent

Review of anthology on twenty-five years of wrongful conviction scholarship development. Editor Daniel Medwed's volume includes chapter by leading experts on exonerations, innocence clinics, various causes of wrongful convictions, capital punishment, procedural issues, tradeoffs, the global innocence movement and other issues.

Transparency and Truth during Custodial Interrogations and Beyond

Transparency and Truth during Custodial Interrogations and Beyond

Preventing Wrongful Convictions: An Analysis of State Investigation Reforms

As more innocents are exonerated and researchers learn more about the causes of wrongful convictions, criminal justice practices have been altered to reduce the number of erroneous convictions, although reforms have varied widely in scope and substance throughout the nation. In this article, we provide an analysis of state-level investigative reforms important to the production of wrongful convictions as of mid-2016. Specifically, we collect and describe reform efforts in three investigatory areas: eyewitness identification, forensics, and interrogations. We then discuss wrongful conviction reforms and the innocence movement more generally, focusing on the importance of continued research into wrongful convictions as a critical policy issue in criminal justice.

Wrongful Convictions and the Innocence Movement

Wrongful Convictions and the Innocence Movement

Framing DNA

The “innocence movement” has often been mentioned, but rarely explored in depth. In particular, scholars have yet to study the beginning of the movement thoroughly. This article explores the early history of the innocence movement, referred to as the “foundations” of the movement, suggesting that the common focus solely on DNA as the source of the movement is an overly narrow historical focus. Based on archival research and interviews with key movement participants, this article draws on social movement theory to better understand the roots of the innocence movement, including its organizational foundation, early leadership, and the identification of the “problem” of wrongful conviction as a cause worthy of collective action. These three developments re-framed DNA as a tool to seek justice through post-conviction exonerations, thus creating the foundation on which the innocence movement was built.

The Federal Role in the Innocence Movement in America

Despite its small contribution to the ranks of the exonerated, and more broadly its relatively small share of all criminal cases, the federal government has played a distinct and important role in fostering and shaping the innocence movement. This article recounts the various ways in which the federal government has done so: through high-profile measures to recognize the reality of wrongful convictions, direct funding of innocence work, use of federal purse strings to shape criminal justice policy, setting an example through legislation on matters as diverse as access to postconviction DNA testing and compensating the wrongly convicted, and leadership on issues such as the problems with the forensic sciences. The article concludes that, moving forward, the committed involvement of the federal government will remain important, especially in tackling such challenging problems as flawed forensic sciences and ensuring financial resources for innocence advocates.

Exoneree Engagement in Policy Reform Work

Through a lens of resilience and growth alongside continuing distress, this exploratory research study examines a convenience sample of exonerees and innocence movement personnel who are engaged in the policy reform process to understand how exoneree involvement may change exonerees themselves, the innocence movement, and possibly the criminal justice system. Data were collected through pre-questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, supplemented with archival material, and analyzed using a narrative approach. Findings emphasize both the personal and broader societal value of exoneree engagement in educating, generating awareness, and advocating about wrongful conviction and the power of having the human voice and face in front of legislators, the public, and the media—vividly portraying that “if they can do it to me, they can do it to anybody.” Findings also caution to be sensitive to where individuals may be in their lives and to honor their choices to engage or not.

Taking Stock of Innocence

This article offers a brief overview of the current state of the Innocence Movement. It begins by reviewing what we know, and do not know, about the incidence of wrongful convictions and their correlates and causes. It then explores select issues that should receive greater attention to help sustain the Innocence Movement and ensure its advancement. Acknowledging that much has been learned about wrongful convictions and that important reforms have been enacted, the article concludes by observing that significant challenges remain and must be addressed before efforts to guard against convicting the innocent are relaxed.

Marginalisation, Managerialism and Wrongful Conviction in Australia

Wrongful convictions have become a growing area of concern among legal scholars, reflecting the success of the global innocence movement that aims to exonerate factually innocent people convicted of crimes they did not commit. While research into wrongful conviction has focused on specific errors such as investigator misconduct, witness misidentification or false confessions, less attention has been given to the role of race and class in leading to these errors. This article raises these issues and the concern as to how Indigenous Australians may be particularly vulnerable to wrongful conviction as a function of a managerialist approach to criminal justice prioritising efficiency, expediency and risk management over due process. The adoption of such an approach has not only exacerbated Indigenous persons' overrepresentation, but has also heightened their vulnerability to miscarriages of justice. The vulnerability is largely due to issues of cross-cultural communication, often negative interactions with police, and increasing difficulty in accessing adequate legal representation. This article argues that wrongful convictions, much like other features of the criminal justice system, are likely to disproportionately affect people belonging to typically marginalised social groups.