Court Justice David Souter reflected this sentiment when he wrote that erroneous convictions (in capital cases) before the development of DNA happen “in numbers never imagined tests” (Kansas 2006: 2544). After analyzing hundreds of post-1989 exonerations, Gross v. Marsh, Jacoby, Matheson, Montgomery, & Patil (2005: 551) made this point even more forcefully: “any plausible guess at the total number of miscarriages of justice in America in the last fifteen years must be in the thousands, perhaps tens of Indeed, a recent report by the Urban thousands.” Institute found erroneous convictions in five percent of homicide and sexual assault cases in Virginia during 1973-1987 (Roman, Walsh, Lachman, & Jahner, 2012). The exoneration of hundreds of innocent prisoners in the last two decades also has had an effect on academic scholarship, generating a virtual explosion of research on wrongful convictions (Leo, 2005). Strikingly, most of this scholarship has occurred in law reviews, not in peer reviewed social science or criminology journals. In the last decade, law professors and legal scholars have written extensively about the legal causes and consequences of wrongful conviction, as well as about legal and policy reforms designed to reduce their occurrence (Leo & Gould, 2009). Beyond the large quantity of legal scholarship, there also has been a sense that a new paradigm may be emerging, one that treats accuracy and reliability within the legal system as on par with or even more important than traditional concerns about procedural due process (Thomas, 2008). Daniel Medwed has coined the to connote the emerging term “innocentrism” centrality of innocence-based arguments and scholarship in criminal law and procedure (Medwed, 2008). Yet for all the attention that academe has given to wrongful convictions, there has been relatively little dialogue on this topic between criminal law scholars and lawyers on the one hand and criminologists or social scientists on the other (Leo & Gould, 2009).
Court Justice David Souter reflected this sentiment when he wrote that erroneous convictions (in capital cases) happen “in numbers never imagined before the development of DNA tests” (Kansas v. Marsh, 2006: 2544). After analyzing hundreds of post-1989 exonerations, Gross Jacoby, Matheson, Montgomery, & Patil (2005: 551) made this point even more forcefully: “any plausible guess at the total number of miscarriages of justice in America in the last fifteen years must be in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.” Indeed, a recent report by the Urban Institute found erroneous convictions in five percent of homicide and sexual assault cases in Virginia during 1973-1987 (Roman, Walsh, Lachman, & Jahner, 2012). The exoneration of hundreds of innocent prisoners in the last two decades also has had an effect on academic scholarship, generating a virtual explosion of research on wrongful convictions (Leo, 2005). Strikingly, most of this scholarship has occurred in law reviews, not in peer reviewed social science or criminology journals. In the last decade, law professors and legal scholars have written extensively about the legal causes and consequences of wrongful conviction, as well as about legal and policy reforms designed to reduce their occurrence (Leo & Gould, 2009). Beyond the large quantity of legal scholarship, there also has been a sense that a new paradigm may be emerging, one that treats accuracy and reliability within the legal system as on par with or even more important than traditional concerns about procedural due process (Thomas, 2008). Daniel Medwed has coined the term “innocentrism” to connote the emerging centrality of innocence-based arguments and scholarship in criminal law and procedure (Medwed, 2008). Yet for all the attention that academe has given to wrongful convictions, there has been relatively little dialogue on this topic between criminal law scholars and lawyers on the one hand and criminologists or social scientists on the other (Leo & Gould, 2009).
Predicting%20Erroneous%20Convictions%20Final%20Report_Edited%20EMBARGOED.docx