Gross and (2008) analysis implicitly assumes that the convicted capital O’Brien’s defendants who were executed are guilty and the ones who were exonerated are innocent, although they are careful to qualify this point by attributing judgments about sufficiency of evidence to the legal system. Unlike Harmon and study (which compared the Lofquist’s (2005) to the but like study, Gross and innocent executed innocent exonerated), Harmon’s (2001) (2008) compare the to the Using chi square tests innocent exonerated guilty executed. O’Brien rather than regression models, Gross and identify several statistically significant O’Brien differences between the capital convictions leading to exoneration and those leading to execution. Defendants who were exonerated were significantly less likely to be reported as mentally ill, more likely to have been tried for crimes that involve two or less victims, more likely to have been tried for crimes that involve children as victims, less likely to have confessed, more likely to have claimed innocence at trial, and more likely to have had an extensive criminal record (especially violent felonies). In addition, in the capital cases leading to exonerations, the time from crime to arrest was significantly much longer than in the cases leading to execution. Gross and analysis demonstrates that these differences are modest predictors of O’Brien’s exoneration in capital cases. I.D. Investigating a New Question: How Erroneous Convictions Differ from Near Misses As each of the four studies indicates, it is essential to create a comparison, or control, group of cases when studying erroneous convictions. Otherwise, researchers risk labeling certain sources as of erroneous convictions when the factors are merely correlates. The task, “causes” again, is to understand how erroneous convictions differ from the other set of cases which – sources are exclusive to erroneous convictions as against a different set of cases and to develop – a better comprehension of how those sources interact with one another. In choosing a
Gross and O’Brien’s (2008) analysis implicitly assumes that the convicted capital defendants who were executed are guilty and the ones who were exonerated are innocent, although they are careful to qualify this point by attributing judgments about sufficiency of evidence to the legal system. Unlike Harmon and Lofquist’s (2005) study (which compared the innocent executed to the innocent exonerated), but like Harmon’s (2001) study, Gross and O’Brien (2008) compare the innocent exonerated to the guilty executed. Using chi square tests rather than regression models, Gross and O’Brien identify several statistically significant differences between the capital convictions leading to exoneration and those leading to execution. Defendants who were exonerated were significantly less likely to be reported as mentally ill, more likely to have been tried for crimes that involve two or less victims, more likely to have been tried for crimes that involve children as victims, less likely to have confessed, more likely to have claimed innocence at trial, and more likely to have had an extensive criminal record (especially violent felonies). In addition, in the capital cases leading to exonerations, the time from crime to arrest was significantly much longer than in the cases leading to execution. Gross and O’Brien’s analysis demonstrates that these differences are modest predictors of exoneration in capital cases. I.D. Investigating a New Question: How Erroneous Convictions Differ from Near Misses As each of the four studies indicates, it is essential to create a comparison, or control, group of cases when studying erroneous convictions. Otherwise, researchers risk labeling certain sources as “causes” of erroneous convictions when the factors are merely correlates. The task, again, is to understand how erroneous convictions differ from the other set of cases – which sources are exclusive to erroneous convictions as against a different set of cases – and to develop a better comprehension of how those sources interact with one another. In choosing a
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