Monique Suarez

ISM- Period 7

Cooley, Craig M., and Brent E. Turvey. "Forensic Science, The CSI Effect, and Wrongful
Convictions." Miscarriages of Justice (2014): 171-95. Ncjrs.gov. U.S. Department of
Justice, Feb. 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Factors that seem to be commonly associated and appear in erroneous

conviction cases are: forensic error, prosecutorial misconduct, false
confession, and eyewitness misidentification
Researchers assume the factors above are causes of erroneous
convictions, however, because they not compare or create control
groups in their studies, they will never know if these are factors
because they are correlate to the case itself
Researches that were used in order to closer comprehend what policy
interventions can influence the justice system to prevent future
erroneous convictions were the following:
A mixed methods approach which had involved quantitative and
qualitative analysis by choosing about 460 erroneous convictions and
near miss cases that resulted in innocent conviction
Took each case and researched location effects, nature of the victim,
nature of the defendant, factors that were given to the police and
prosecutor, quality of work by the criminal justice system, and quality
of work by the defense (Paragraph 3).
These reaches helped the researchers figure out that there were 10
factors that helped to explain wrongful convictions some of those
being: Brady violations, forensic error, a prosecution and defense case,
lying by a non-eyewitness, and race effects
Believe that it is more effective to focus on errors and causes than the
failure of the criminal justice system in order to find ways to further
prevent these erroneous convictions
A background condition that might lead to wrongful conviction is the
sentimentality formed due to the crime and its association with the
media
An example is if someone is convicted of a crime like murder or rape
against children. People tend to want a criminal found guilty and put in
jail as quickly as possible because of the inflame of the sensibilities
of the public which can easily be enforced by press coverage on
television
During these researches, the control groups were near misses which
means that people are allowed to show how the criminal justice
system identifies and corrects the indictment of innocent defendants
before an erroneous conviction get showed how the justice system
works and how they deal with people being wrongfully convicted
The most common forensic error is state witnesses giving an improper
testimony at a trial and overstates precision of particular results that
are obtained
Example of the forensic error is: In a case involving microscopic hair
analysis, the scientist erroneously stated that there was a 1 in 10,000

chance that the defendants hair was not the hair found on the rape
victims bed. This was highly misleading because no reliable statistics
exist to analyze hair matches (Pg. 77).
This online journal for professionals portrayed the factors that seem to commonly
occur in erroneous convictions and also discusses different types of research done
to figure out whether these particular factors are factors of all wrongful convictions
or are just correlates to particular cases.