False confessions are a contributing factor in almost 30% of DNA exonerations in the United States. Similar problems have been documented all over the world. We present a novel framework to highlight the processes through which innocent people, once misidentified as suspects, experience cumulative disadvantages that culminate in pernicious consequences. The cumulative-disadvantage framework details how the innocent suspect's naivete and the interrogator's presumption of guilt trigger a process that can lead to false confession, the aftereffects of which spread to corrupt evidence gathering, bias forensic analysis, and virtually ensure wrongful convictions at trial or through pressured false guilty pleas. The framework integrates nascent research underscoring the enduring effects of the accumulated disadvantages postconviction and even after exoneration. We synthesize findings from psychological science, corroborating naturalistic evidence, and relevant legal precedents to explain how an innocent suspect's disadvantages can accumulate through the actions of law enforcement, forensic examiners, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, and appeals courts. We conclude with prescribed research directions that can lead to empirically driven reforms to address the gestalt of the multistage process.

Cumulative Disadvantage: A Psychological Framework for Understanding How Innocence Can Lead to Confession, Wrongful Conviction, and Beyond:

This article reflects on the author’s 2005 article, “Rethinking the Study of Miscarriages of Justice,” which sought to describe what scholars empirically knew at that time about the phenomenon, causes and consequences of wrongful convictions in America. The 2005 article argued that the study of wrongful convictions constituted a coherent academic field of study and set forth a vision for a more sophisticated, insightful and generalizable criminology of wrongful conviction. In this current article, the author revisits the ideas first developed in “Rethinking the Study of Miscarriages of Justice” in order to evaluate what scholars have learned about wrongful convictions in the last decade, and what challenges lie ahead for developing a more robust criminology of wrongful conviction. The article concludes that there have been significant theoretical, methodological and substantive advances in the last decade, but that a root cause analysis of wrongful convictions has yet to come to fruition and urges empirical scholars to begin to study other sources of error and inaccuracy in the criminal justice system. Scholars should develop a criminology of erroneous outcomes, not just of erroneous conviction. By studying both sets of outcomes, scholars can improve accuracy and reduce errors across the board.

The Criminology of Wrongful Conviction: A Decade Later

One concern with the rise of large language models lies with their potential for significant harm, particularly from pretraining on biased, obscene, copyrighted, and private information. Emerging ethical approaches have attempted to filter pretraining material, but such approaches have been ad hoc and failed to take context into account. We offer an approach to filtering grounded in law, which has directly addressed the tradeoffs in filtering material. First, we gather and make available the Pile of Law, a 256GB (and growing) dataset of open-source English-language legal and administrative data, covering court opinions, contracts, administrative rules, and legislative records. Pretraining on the Pile of Law may help with legal tasks that have the promise to improve access to justice. Second, we distill the legal norms that governments have developed to constrain the inclusion of toxic or private content into actionable lessons for researchers and discuss how our dataset reflects these norms. Third, we show how the Pile of Law offers researchers the opportunity to learn such filtering rules directly from the data, providing an exciting new research direction in model-based processing.

Pile of Law: Learning Responsible Data Filtering from the Law and a 256GB Open-Source Legal Dataset

This article offers a brief overview of the current state of the Innocence Movement. It begins by reviewing what we know, and do not know, about the incidence of wrongful convictions and their corr...

Taking Stock of Innocence Movements, Mountains, and Wrongful Convictions

This article reflects on the author’s 2005 article, “Rethinking the Study of Miscarriages of Justice,” which sought to describe what scholars empirically knew at that time about the phenomenon, cau...

/pdf/expungement-and-post-exoneration-offending-bbzu1jvhw4.pdf

Expungement and Post-exoneration Offending

I. INTRODUCTION This article stems from a study of the post-release behavior of individuals following exoneration. (1) In the course of conducting research on post-release behavior, the most comprehensive such study to date, an interesting and troubling finding emerged: expungement does not always follow exoneration. (2) Expungement is the "[p]rocess by which [a] record of criminal conviction is destroyed or sealed" from the state or federal repository. (3) In instances where a former defendant is exonerated, expungement is sometimes part of the relief granted. (4) In most cases, however, it must be secured in a separate civil action. (5) Though every member of our sample has been deemed not guilty by an official body, approximately forty-two percent of these exonerees still had evidence of the wrongful conviction on their record. (6) This disturbing statistic has significant consequences for exonerees and the criminal justice system generally. The principal research examines post-release offending of 117 individuals who were exonerated and released between 1999 and 2009. (7) The study explores a variety of questions: What is the risk posed by these individuals? Are they victims of prisonization? In other words, does their time in prison convert them into criminals? Do exonerees with prior offenses offend more than exonorees with no prior offenses? Do exonerees who were found guilty of certain types of crimes offend more than others? The sample consists principally of exonorees whose cases have been documented by the Center on Wrongful Convictions ("CWC") at the Bluhm Legal Clinic of Northwestern University Law School. These records are publicly available. To explore post-release offending, the authors ran public record searches in four states--Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas--using the assistance of a commercial data provider. (8) In order to obtain criminal history information, a subject's date of birth had to be provided. (9) If we were unable to obtain that information, that case was excluded from the study. Everyone for whom we could find the necessary identifying information was included. Gathering this data presented a unique opportunity to look at the criminal history records of exonerees. (10) We were immediately struck by the fact that many exonerees have evidence of the crime for which they were wrongfully convicted on their criminal record. This article explores the relationship between exoneration and expungement. Part II presents our findings regarding expungement. We attempt to explain some of the results by offering a brief overview of current expungement laws and procedures in the four subject states. Within this section we also briefly discuss the relationship between executive pardons, exoneration, and expungement. Part III discusses the implications of having a criminal record. These include loss of privileges of citizenship, barriers to employment, loss of benefits, and access to government documents. The section notes that criminal records are increasingly accessible, which enhances the associated stigma. The article concludes with a brief review and recommendation for legal reform. II. EXPUNGEMENT IN PRACTICE A. Present Data on Expungement We collected criminal history data in 117 cases in which a defendant was determined by an official act to be not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted and incarcerated. (11) Eighteen of the cases were from Florida, thirty-one from Illinois, twenty-four from New York, and forty-six from Texas. The situation was most encouraging in New York. None of the twenty-four New York cases showed any record of the prior wrongful conviction. New York law permits the sealing of cases where charges have been dismissed, vacated, set aside, not filed, or otherwise terminated. (12) In our experience, this process was automatic. In the three states where clearing the record is discretionary, expungement is irregular and possibly random. …

The Expungement Myth

/pdf/compensation-statutes-and-post-exoneration-offending-4e00tr3xby.pdf

Valerie West

Papers

Expungement and Post-exoneration Offending

The Expungement Myth

Compensation Statutes and Post-exoneration Offending