Understanding Wrongful Conviction

Understanding Wrongful Conviction PDF Author: Robert J. Ramsey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781516597598
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Understanding Wrongful Conviction: How Innocent People Are Convicted of Crimes They Did Not Commit identifies and discusses breakdowns in the criminal justice system that can have profoundly negative effects on individuals operating within or who are subjects of the system. The text also explores what can be done to successfully reduce the incidence of wrongful conviction. The opening chapter defines wrongful conviction, explains the importance of its study, and pro

Understanding Wrongful Conviction

Understanding Wrongful Conviction PDF Author: Robert J. Ramsey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781516597598
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book

Book Description
Understanding Wrongful Conviction: How Innocent People Are Convicted of Crimes They Did Not Commit identifies and discusses breakdowns in the criminal justice system that can have profoundly negative effects on individuals operating within or who are subjects of the system. The text also explores what can be done to successfully reduce the incidence of wrongful conviction. The opening chapter defines wrongful conviction, explains the importance of its study, and pro

Wrongful Conviction

Wrongful Conviction PDF Author: James R. Acker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781594607530
Category : Clemency
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume addresses issues of law, science, and policy related to wrongful convictions in the American system of justice. Coverage includes the incidence, correlates, causes, and consequences of wrongful convictions, as well as recommended reforms. The materials are organized in the form of a casebook, comprising edited judicial decisions and complementary materials from law, psychology, criminal justice, and related disciplines. "Wrongful convictions are tragedies on multiple levels. By understanding how they occur, however, we can learn how to prevent them -- and better identify those that exist. This text is a valuable resource for anyone interested in advancing justice and safety through our systems of criminal justice."-- Stephen Saloom, Policy Director, Innocence Project "The ice has finally been broken. Acker and Redlich's Wrongful Conviction is the first casebook dedicated solely to the subject of wrongful convictions. It has set a high standard of excellence that will be a tough act to follow. Not only will this well-organized and easy-to-read casebook appeal to law professors who teach seminars in such subjects as wrongful convictions, criminal procedure, and psychology and the law, but it should also appeal to undergraduate professors who teach students interested in careers in law and criminal justice."-- Steven A. Drizin, Clinical Professor of Law and Legal Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Northwestern University School of Law "This book sets out an important and accessible track of study. Starting with the question of what is a wrongful conviction, the authors also explain the basic features of the criminal process and evidence law, and introduce contributions from the social sciences to help our understanding of sources of error. That journey will engage all interested in understanding what can cause wrongful convictions and what can improve the quality of criminal justice."-- Brandon L. Garrett, Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law "Acker and Redlich provide a current and comprehensive analysis of the legal procedures and standards that produce and resolve wrongful criminal convictions. Their presentation is part handbook for lawyers, part history lesson for scholars, and part quest for policy reforms. Their coverage is engaging and broad: from false confessions and faulty eyewitness identification, to flawed forensic evidence and, ultimately, compensation for those who are exonerated. I urge all defense attorneys to read and use this book; and I beg all prosecutors to do the same. Professors around the country: assign this book to all of your students!" -- Kimberly J. Cook, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of North Carolina Wilmington "Acker and Redlich have succeeded admirably in achieving their goals of selecting watershed and little-known, but important cases that define and illustrate the focal issues in each area of wrongful conviction and in discussing the results of relevant social science research and their policy implications. The notes and questions following each section are excellent. The notes provide supplemental material in a condensed fashion and the questions prompt thoughtful dialogue and encourage further study. ... an outstanding scholarly contribution to the field of wrongful conviction." -- Criminal Law Bulletin "An excellent book ... It should also be on the shelf of every scholar interested in wrongful convictions, as it provides a wealth of important materials." -- Criminal Justice Review

Overturning Wrongful Convictions

Overturning Wrongful Convictions PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Murray, PhD
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 1467763071
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Imagine being convicted of a crime you didn't commit and spending years behind bars. Since 1989 more than 1,400 Americans who experienced this injustice have been exonerated. Some of the people who have won their freedom include Ronald Cotton, who was falsely convicted of raping a college student; Nicole Harris, who was unjustly imprisoned for the death of her son; and intellectually disabled Earl Washington Jr., who was unfairly sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young mother. Wrongful convictions shatter lives and harm society by allowing real perpetrators to potentially commit additional crimes. How can such injustices happen? Overturning Wrongful Convictions recounts stories of individuals who served someone else's prison time due to mistaken eyewitness identification, police misconduct, faulty forensic science, poor legal representation, courtroom mistakes, and other factors. You'll learn about the legal processes that can lead to unjust convictions and about the Innocence Project and other organizations dedicated to righting these wrongs. The sciences—including psychology, criminology, police science, and forensic science—work hand in hand with the legal system to prosecute and punish those people whose actions break laws. Those same sciences can also be used to free people who have been wrongfully convicted. As a society, can we learn from past mistakes to avoid more unjust convictions?

Wrongful Convictions

Wrongful Convictions PDF Author: Justin Brooks
Publisher: Vandeplas Pub.
ISBN: 9781600422980
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 698

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Book Description
Wrongful Convictions: Cases and Materials is the first legal textbook to explore the complex and fascinating legal and scientific issues involved in wrongful convictions and the exoneration of the innocent. This exciting area of the law is developing at a rapid pace as we learn more about the causes of wrongful conviction with each exoneration. The book is designed to teach about procedure related to the cases, as well as give a broad overview of the causes of wrongful convictions including false eyewitness testimony, false confessions, ineffective assistance of counsel, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and false forensic evidence. In this third edition, there have been significant updates to the cases and statutes from the previous edition, including expanded notes at the end of the chapters, as well as additional chapters on infant deaths, sex crimes against children, and arson.

Convicted but Innocent

Convicted but Innocent PDF Author: C. Ronald Huff
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1452221170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Addressing the specific issues surrounding wrongful convictions and their implications for society, Convicted but Innocent includes: survey data concerning the possible magnitude of the problem and its causes; fascinating actual case samples; detailed analyses of the major factors associated with wrongful conviction; discussion of public policy implications; and recommendations for reducing the occurrence of such convictions. The authors maintain that while no system of justice can be perfect, a focus on preventable errors can substantially reduce the number of current conviction injustices.

Convicting the Innocent

Convicting the Innocent PDF Author: Brandon L. Garrett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674060989
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

The Wrongful Convictions Reader

The Wrongful Convictions Reader PDF Author: Russell D. Covey
Publisher: Carolina Academic Press LLC
ISBN: 9781531023874
Category : Criminal investigation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the "innocence revolution" has shaken the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and ineffective assistance of counsel. The second edition provides an expanded treatment of certain critical topics. The reader now includes an entire chapter devoted to race and wrongful convictions and provides expanded treatment of the intersections between gender, sexual orientation, and disability and wrongful conviction. The addition of these topics in expanded form creates new options for instructors to explore timely topics in the field of compelling concern to many contemporary students. As before, the book remains more than a mere 'reader' of literature in the field, but rather a book that can serve as the principal text in doctrinal as well as experiential courses. Each chapter is divided into three sections that include: readings, current law overview--which summarizes the key cases in the area; and legal materials, exercises, and media--which provides relevant experiential activities. Examples from the legal materials, exercises, and media sections includes: Recommended listening and viewing: timed excerpts from podcast episodes, films, and television clips; Oral advocacy exercises: mock bail arguments, parole hearings, testimony before the state legislature, presentations to the state rules committee, appellate oral arguments; Written advocacy exercises: practice motions and comparing state statutes; Issue spotting exercises: transcripts from interrogations and in-court testimony; Review: reflective essays, short answer questions, and true/false questions; Team exercises: plea negotiations; Discussion prompts; and Actual wrongful conviction case documents.

Wrongful Conviction and Criminal Justice Reform

Wrongful Conviction and Criminal Justice Reform PDF Author: Marvin Zalman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135077436
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Wrongful Conviction and Criminal Justice Reform is an important addition to the literature and teaching on innocence reform. This book delves into wrongful convictions studies but expands upon them by offering potential reforms that would alleviate the problem of wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system. Written to be accessible to students, Wrongful Conviction and Criminal Justice Reform is a main text for wrongful convictions courses or a secondary text for more general courses in criminal justice, political science, and law school innocence clinics.

Innocent

Innocent PDF Author: Scott Christianson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081471675X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Innocent graphically documents forty-two recent criminal cases to find evidence of shocking miscarriages of justice, especially in murder cases. Based upon interviews with more than 200 people and reviews of hundreds internal case files, court records, smoking-gun memoranda, and other documents, Scott Christianson gets inside the legal cases, revealing the mistakes, abuses, and underlying factors that led to miscarriages of justice, while also describing how determined prisoners, post-conviction attorneys, advocates, and journalists struggle against tremendous odds to try to win their exonerations. The result is a powerful work that recounts the human costs of a criminal justice system gone awry, and shows us how wrongful convictions can—and do—happen everywhere.

Redeeming Justice

Redeeming Justice PDF Author: Jarrett Adams
Publisher: Convergent Books
ISBN: 0593137817
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
“A moving and beautifully crafted memoir.”—SCOTT TUROW “A daring act of justified defiance.”—SHAKA SENGHOR “Nothing less than heroic.”—JOHN GRISHAM He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now a pioneering lawyer, he recalls the journey that led to his exoneration—and inspired him to devote his life to fighting the many injustices in our legal system. Seventeen years old and facing nearly thirty years behind bars, Jarrett Adams sought to figure out the why behind his fate. Sustained by his mother and aunts who brought him back from the edge of despair through letters of prayer and encouragement, Adams became obsessed with our legal system in all its damaged glory. After studying how his constitutional rights to effective counsel had been violated, he solicited the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, an organization that exonerates the wrongfully convicted, and won his release after nearly ten years in prison. But the journey was far from over. Adams took the lessons he learned through his incarceration and worked his way through law school with the goal of helping those who, like himself, had faced our legal system at its worst. After earning his law degree, he worked with the New York Innocence Project, becoming the first exoneree ever hired by the nonprofit as a lawyer. In his first case with the Innocence Project, he argued before the same court that had convicted him a decade earlier—and won. In this illuminating story of hope and full-circle redemption, Adams draws on his life and the cases of his clients to show the racist tactics used to convict young men of color, the unique challenges facing exonerees once released, and how the lack of equal representation in our courts is a failure not only of empathy but of our collective ability to uncover the truth. Redeeming Justice is an unforgettable firsthand account of the limits—and possibilities—of our country’s system of law.