There are several reasons that wrongful convictions happen, and essentially what it boils down to is errors of either the criminal justice professional, or the eyewitness testimony. In many of the cases of wrongful conviction there were a lot of the same errors that led to the conviction of innocent people. Errors in eyewitness identification; in some cases the eyewitness was pressured into identifying someone, even if they were not sure. Antiquated forensic testing; in many cases outdated equipment and methods had been use during forensic tests, which lead to inaccurate results. Testimony by questionable informants; during the trials there were witness testimonies that were questionable, because their stories were not straight, or the witness themselves had a background that would make their story questionable. These are just a few of many reasons why innocent people were incarcerated.…
Chapter 5 describes how, within the last century, mounting scholarly evidence has exposed institutional flaws within our judicial and police systems, resulting in the convictions of innocent persons for capital crimes. In some cases, overzealous behavior by police and prosecutors, led to the imprisonment of “factually” innocent defendants. While police sometimes coerced confessions or failed to conduct full investigations, prosectors and judges failed to evidence which might exonerate the defendant. Other judicial violations found through study included failure to follow courtroom procedures related to rule of law. One of the first wrongful conviction initiatives was through a congressional investigation in 1912. Although a noble undertaking for its time, the reports was flawed in its evidentiary compilation. The data was poorly collected and its findings poorly deduced. According to the report, no innocent person had been executed by the Federal government.…
In Brandon L. Garrett's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, he makes it very clear how wrongful convictions occur and how these people have spent many years in prison for crimes they never committed. Garrett presents 250 cases of innocent people who were convicted wrongfully because the prosecutors opposed testing the DNA of those convicted. Garrett provided simple statistics such as graphs, percentages, and charts to help the reader understand just how great of an impact this was.…
The chapter focuses on the importance of contaminated confessions by expanding on the various reasons behind the possibility as to why a confession might be contaminated, these are identified throughout the text in various explanations as to why confessions can be tampered with: the puzzle of false confessions, contaminated false confessions, law enforcement practices, corroborated and nonpublic facts, denying disclosing facts, recorded false interrogations, and inconsistent facts (Garrett, 2011). In the case of Jeffery Deskovic’s false confession the police officers gave him facts that were explicit to the case and despite the DNA evidence that was pointing to someone else committing the crime, Jeffery was convicted for 16 years. Jeffery sued for his civil rights being violated. The puzzle behind false confessions is that police are suspected of feeding details of a crime to a compliant suspect. The book asked the question “why do innocent people confess in detail to crimes they had not committed” The relational is that if an individual gives the police exactly what they want then that will, in turn, let those being questioned to be able to go home (Garrett, 2011).…
As with all fallacies, in order to understand the suspect and situational factors involved in false confessions, more research needs to continue. It is a popular now known fact that studies of false confessions reveal most people who make false confessions are the young, developmentally disabled or mentally ill. However, if a true suspect is foolish enough to fall for police deception, they do so at their own peril (Rhode Island v. Innes, 1980; State v. Jackson, 1983).…
Since 1992, almost three hundred people in the United States have been exonerated by the Innocence Project. What this means is that almost three hundred people have been acquitted for a crime that they were falsely convicted of committing and were then released back into society. Many of these false convictions were the result of a lack of technology back in the time of the trials which lead to unvalidated or improper use of forensic science. Some additional reasons that people are wrongfully convicted are misidentifications from eyewitnesses and false confessions. In this paper, I plan to write about Kenneth Ireland. His story shows how wrongful convictions and exonerations are issues in the United States.…
In society it is substantially common for people to be exonerated for a crime they did not commit. Unfortunately it is even more common for that to happen when they are incarcerated due to inaccurate eyewitness testimonies. Eyewitness research has demonstrated that there are a multitude of ways to conduct identification processes, however, the processes that police often use today are more likely to encourage inaccurate identification. In addition there have been many case studies of exonerated people that show the downfalls of eyewitness testimony. Wrongful incarceration has consistently demonstrated that inaccurate identification carries a big weight when it comes to wrongful identification, in fact, in the article Contamination of Eyewitness Self-Reports and Mistaken-Identification Problem by Laura Smalarz and Gary L. Wells, they state that there is an average of thirty three percent of witnesses who make an identification from a lineup identify a known innocent filler. There is a lot of thought behind the processes of identification but there are so many variables that can taint a subject’s confidence.…
There are three issues focus in this article: the manner in which false confession generated, change in susceptibility to interrogative influence, and how false confession lead the wrongful conviction of innocents. In the Norfolk Four case, police pressured the innocent suspects and generate four false confessions. Using the case of the Norfolk Four, the author claims the seven psychological processes that are often involved from false confessions to wrongful conviction. The psychological behavior has affected the confessor and others thinking and actions involved to produce a wrongful…
The innocence project and forensic science are two forms that can help determine who the actual preparatory was and can help people who have been wrongly convicted in a crime he/she did not commit. In many cases the forensic such as DNA, blood sample, or semen and other evidence that have been lost or even wrongly tested can end up becoming a big mistake that can send someone to jail that did not commit the crime. In the article, Forensic Problems and Wrongfully Convictions (2009) states that, the most wrongful convictions involve more than one contributing cases, for example, if an eyewitness may have wrongly identified an innocent person, and in the same case a forensic analyst may have testified that hairs from the crime scene match the defendant’s hair. In the jury’s eyes, the eyewitness testimony is strengthened by the forensic evidence (Forensic Problems and Wrongfully Convictions, 2009). Not always the eye witnesses are right with what they say so having the right forensic evidence can help with determine who is actually the perpetrator. Such as this case were the eyewitness was not so good and also a lot of the evidence was miss communicated.…
These wrongful convictions played a major role in more than 75% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing (The Innocence Project, 2010). Although eyewitness testimony can be critical evidence before a judge or jury; 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. The research which was conducted by the Innocence Project revealed that the human mind is not like a tape recorder or video camera; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall the instance exactly how it occurred. Nevertheless, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene, it must be documented carefully and retrieved methodically and quickly, or it can be contaminated (The Innocence project 2010). We as people can carry fibers, through our clothing, skin and hair that can cause the contamination of a crime scene just by not following proper procedure. Furthermore, in these types of cases, DNA has proven what scientists already know, that eyewitness identification is frequently…
The technique while effective against guilty suspects have a tendency to elicit false confessions from innocent suspects. The Reid technique is applied the same way for both adults and juvenile suspects. However, based on the low maturity level of juvenile offenders they are more likely to wrongfully implicate themselves in criminal activities that they did not have any part of. Confessions carries a lot of weight in a court proceeding, as suspects are often convicted without any physical or corroborating evidence. It was not until recent years that a prevalence of wrongful convictions through false confession was noticed. Wrongfully convicted people spend many years in prison before they were exonerated by DNA evidence. Furthermore, contrary to popular beliefs, numerous studies found that innocent suspects do provide investigators with false incriminating…
Eyewitness Misidentification alone is the greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in 72% of convictions. It’s unbelievable because research shows that memory is malleable and that an eye witness who is uncertain, can become much more certain over time. I also learned that when an eyewitness identifies a suspect it’s possible the police unconsciously provides information to them. Officers also try and use one suspect in multiple procedures with the eyewitness and that will increase the witness’s confidence to…
The suspect is interrogated, presented with false information, and admits guilt to actions he or she committed; or the suspect is interrogated, presented with false information, and admits guilt to actions he or she never committed. How and why does this occur, are the tactics that police use justified, and on a whole do they produce competent results? The confession to a crime is viewed by law enforcement and the judicial system as the proverbial nail in the coffin; admission is highly sought and revered. Brasswell et al., (2015) detailed eight deceptive interrogation techniques that law enforcement use to secure an admission, many of which can be viewed simply as police officers doing their job within the constraints the judicial system have given them. Alternately fabricated evidence, exaggerating the nature and severity of the offense, misrepresenting identity, and the use of promises stand out as the four that have an overt ethical dilemma. These tactics have elicited false confessions; coerced-compliant false confessions, and coerced-internalized false confessions (Kassin, 2008), both of which occur with pressure from the police and in this day and age, most of the police induced pressure being psychological in…
Wrongful conviction can be described as a miscarriage of justice or an unfair decision in a court of law. It is important to identify wrongful convictions and find ways to reduce or eliminate the causes. We need to free the wrongly prosecuted through DNA testing and help…
an effort to find preventative measures to stop this disturbing glitch within the Canadian criminal…
