Tradeoffs Between Wrongful Convictions and Wrongful Acquittals: Understanding and Avoiding the Risks

Concern about Wrongful Convictions

The wrongful conviction of an innocent person is the worst nightmare to anyone who cares about justice. Eighty years ago, Judge Learned Hand said, “Our procedure has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.”1 The good judge was,as events of the last decade have conclusively proved, simply wrong.Although the criminal justice system has a number of sa...

The Scope of Wrongful Convictions

There is no international consensus as to what constitutes a “wrongful conviction”. The scope of wrongful convictions is contested, with different fields of academic study and different countries adopting different definitions. This multiplicity of definitions exists within the People’s Republic of China (PRC or China). The question of what makes convictions wrongful involves issues of law and ...

Avoiding Wrongful Convictions: Re-examining the “Wrong-Person” Defense

A criminal defendant has a constitutional right to a “meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense.” Grounded in several different constitutional provisions, this right has been invoked as a defense to criminal charges in a variety of contexts and has been sustained by the Supreme Court on several occasions. Probably no context, however, has been as controversial and difficult for the c...

Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science

There has been an explosion of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions in the last decade, reflecting a growing concern about the problem of actual innocence in the criminal justice system. Yet criminal law and procedure scholars have engaged in relatively little dialogue or collaboration on this topic with criminologists. In this article, we use the empirical study of wrongful convictions to...

Torts--wrongful birth and wrongful life.