Running head: COURT SYSTEMS AND WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS 1

Court Systems/Wrongful Convictions

Name

Academic Institution
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Abstract
Wrongful conviction is termed as the conviction of a literally innocent individual and is
projected to happen in roughly 1 to 5 percent of all convictions happening within America.
Wrongful convictions include both procedural issues and culpability issues established to have a
significant effect on the earlier conviction. Whereas persons may be freed and established not to
be criminally accountable, he/she could still encounter consequences emanating from the charges
like civil suits along with a criminal record establishing prison time served. This study will
employ research design methods such as survey measures, existing data set created by The
National Registry of Exonerations (NRE)
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Introduction
In recent years, the number of convictions of factually innocent persons has risen

drastically in USA due to convictions that are gotten in contravention of constitutional or other

procedural rights. Police and prosecutorial misconduct are also to blame for this. The focus of

this work is on wrongful conviction in the United States. Also, a large number of investigative

journalism reports and highly informative films and documentaries have provided great insight

into the causes, consequences, and potential reforms of wrongful convictions (Walsh et al.,

2018). 

Furthermore, although an individual might be freed from earlier charges, the charges and

consequences of the said charges do not constantly vanish after the release, as previously shown

with the likelihood of civil liability. So that the charges along with possible prison time served,

to disappear, a defendant ought to seek exoneration.

Problem statement

Whereas a lot of attempts have been made to compute how many innocent individuals

have been unjustly convicted, presently there has not been a conclusive or effective answer to

this question. This proposed research projects attempts to narrow the gap by offering an in-depth

look at wrongful convictions from an American perspective, via the examination of public

inquiries.
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Literature Review

Courts in USA

Courts in the United States are reluctant to re-examine or reopen cases already decided

upon by another court.  The current legal system is made to allow the aggrieved by the judicial

system to have their grievances reheard by an appellate court even in the wake of new evidence.

(Cutler, 2012)

 The appellant or petitioner has to prove to the appellate court using clear facts and

evidence that he/she was wronged in the original trial by errors of law such as irregularity or

discrepancy in the application of law, misrepresentation of facts, violation of rights, or fault in

judicial procedure that had resulted in the appellant being denied the due process of law owed to

all Americans in a court of law ( Covey, 2012).Minor errors that would not affect the outcome or

judgement of a case cannot be used to request an appeal and are not considered grounds for

reversing the judgment of a lower court (Arcaro, 2009)

Issue of circumstantial Evidence

Indirect evidence, also called circumstantial evidence, is all other evidence, such as the

fingerprint of an accused found at the crime scene. Indirect evidence does not by itself prove the

offence, but through interpretation of the circumstances and in conjunction with other evidence

may contribute to a body of evidence that could prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (Garoupa

& Rizzolli, 2012). Strong circumstantial evidence that only leads to one logical conclusion can

sometimes become the evidence the court uses in reaching belief beyond a reasonable doubt to

convict an accused. It requires assumptions and logical inferences to be made by the court to

attribute meaning to the evidence.

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Direct evidence is evidence that will prove the point in fact without interpretation of

circumstances. (Marvin et al., 2011). It is any evidence that can show the court that something

occurred without the need for the judge to make inferences or assumptions to reach a conclusion.

“When one or more things are proved, from which our experience enables us to ascertain

that another, not proved, must have happened, we presume that it did happen, as well in criminal

as in civil cases.” (Gould et al., 2013). The court will also generally attribute a high probative

value to physical exhibits. The court likes physical evidence because they are items the court can

see and examine to interpret the facts beyond a reasonable doubt. These kinds of physical

evidence (exhibits) can be examined and analyzed by experts who can provide the court with

expert opinions that connect the item of evidence to a person, place, or the criminal event; this

allows the court to consider circumstantial connections of the accused to the crime scene or the

accused to the victim.

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Arcaro (2009), argues that our system does not guarantee either the conviction of the

guilty or the acquittal of the innocent. Certain safeguards are erected which make it more

difficult to convict the innocent than to acquit the guilty, but all that our system guarantees is a

fair trial. It is a price which every member of a civilized community must pay for the erection

and maintenance of machinery for administering justice that he may become the victim of its

imperfect functioning.

Most of the major U.S. Supreme Court decisions in criminal procedure that marked the

Warren court, such as Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), Miranda v. Arizona (1966), and Sheppard v.

Maxwell (1966), left serious questions as to the innocence of these people. The present study
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does not include such cases (Huff & Killias, 2010). Our operational definition of "wrongful

conviction" includes only those cases in which a person was convicted of a felony but later was

exonerated, generally due to evidence that had been available but was not sufficiently utilized at

the time of the conviction, new evidence that was not previously available, or in some cases the

confession of the actual culprit. Wrongful conviction as the gravest of errors that can occur in

our system of justice for the victims of this sort of miscarriage of justice, it makes no practical

difference whether the error leading to the wrongful conviction has been unintentional or has

been the result of actual malice (Innocence Staff, 2017).

Overturning of Convictions

According to Gould et al. (2013), editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and

author of the report, a record 149 people were exonerated in the US in 2013, nearly three a week,

according to a new report that found a rising number of overturned convictions in a handful of

counties around the country.

Systemic problems, misconduct by police and officials, false confessions, guilty pleas in

cases without crimes and a growing movement to investigate and overturn wrongful convictions.

According to Campbell and Denov (2016) edition of the National Registry of

Exonerations report, work done by conviction integrity units (“CIUs”), innocence projects, and

what some legal experts refer to as the “two-tiered” criminal justice system, have helped move

the meter in the area of wrongful convictions. They played a major role in exonerations in 2016,

helping to secure a record 54 exonerations in 2016. Combined, CIUs and innocence projects

secured 69 percent of exonerations for 2017 (Walsh et al., 2017). Those eventually exonerated in
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2017, according to the Registry report, spent an average of 10.6 years incarcerated for their

convictions. That’s a total of 1,478 total years of life lost behind bars. In 2017, the person who

spent the most time previously incarcerated while eventually being proven innocent, Ledura

Watkins, spent over 41 years in prison for a murder of a school teacher that he did not commit

(Walsh et al., 2017). While CIUs and innocence projects played a vital role in securing

exonerations for the wrongfully accused, the bad news is that all of the innocence projects are

greatly overbooked and don’t have the staffing to take all of the possible cases. So, they have to

be greatly selective in the cases they take on. Staff (Walsh et al., 2012).
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Research Methods

Study Design

This study is a cross-sectional design that will employ anonymous survey to collect quantitative

data.

Survey Measures

The 90-item gender survey will be administered via Google Forms (2017), an online survey

resource, to ensure secrecy of all participants. The survey will encompass questions having

following answer formats: cumulative response, dichotomous response, and interval response.

The questions will be asked via three main ways, encompassing to what extent, frequency, and

intensity. There will also be open-ended questions

The National Registry of Exonerations

The research proposed here will utilize an existing data set developed by The National Registry

of Exonerations (NRE). The registry represents an online database of over 1000 (as of May 4,

2015) exonerations ascertained since 1989. The registry offers both empirical data on personal

cases, besides qualitative abstracts of facts for individual cases. The registry catalogs exoneration

cases that occurred in the United States, and does not provide any comparative data from other

nations. It includes cases that were exonerated in 1989 or later, and to qualify, the exonerations

must be based on factual innocence.

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Conclusion

Criminal Justice system in the USA should be reviewed to ensure integrity of

administration of justice. Misconduct by officials should be discouraged to prevent miscourage

of justice, prosecutors should collect evidence from all available sources and in all available

forms to ensure the quality of cases presented before the courts are high. The work done by

conviction integrity units and innocence projects cannot be overlooked and should be encouraged

across the country as a means of checking the prosecutorial weaknesses. Wrongful convicts

should be compensated for the years wasted behind bars and also to ensure that prosecution

doesn’t get away with such errors.

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References

Arcaro, G. (2009). Criminal Investigations: Forming Reasonable Grounds (Fift ed.). Toronto,

Ontario: Emond Montgomery Publications Limited.

Campbell, K. M., & Denov, M. (2016). Wrongful Convictions. Criminal Justice in Canada: A

Reader, (Canadian ed.), 225.

Covey, R. (2012). Police misconduct as a cause of wrongful convictions. Wash. UL Rev., 90,

1133.

Cutler, B. L. (2012). Conviction of the innocent: Lessons from psychological research. American

Psychological Association

Garoupa, N., & Rizzolli, M. (2012). Wrongful convictions do lower deterrence. Journal of

Institutional and Theoretical Economics JITE, 168(2), 224-231.

Gould, J., Carrano, J., Leo, R., & Young, J. (2013). Predicting erroneous convictions: A social

science approach to miscarriages of justice.

Huff, C. R., & Killias, M. (Eds.). (2010). Wrongful conviction: International perspectives on

miscarriages of justice. Temple University Press.

Innocence Staff, (2017) Report: Exonerations in 2017

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Marvin Zalman, Matthew J. Larson, Brad Smith (2011): Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Wrongful

Convictions

Walsh, K., Hussemann, J., Flynn, A., Yahner, J., Golian, L., The Urban Institute, & United

States of America. (2017). Estimating the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions.