The American Psychology-Law Society has solicited a scientific review paper on eyewitness misidentification, to be published in the February issue of Law and Human Behavior. The report updates the previous white paper, which is now more than twenty years old.
A summary of the updated review paper can be found here.
A new article by Jennifer N. Weintraub has been published in Crime & Delinquency. It explores the relationship between prosecutorial misconduct and the identification of true perpetrators in cases of wrongful conviction. You can find the title and abstract below. For more information, check out the journal’s website here.
Title: Obstructing Justice: The Association Between Prosecutorial Misconduct and the Identification of True Perpetrators
Author: Jennifer N. Weintraub
Abstract: Prosecutorial misconduct is a potential barrier to identifying true perpetrators of crimes in wrongful conviction cases. Previous theories posit that pressures on prosecutors to carry out their role as ministers of justice in an adversarial system can incentivize misconduct and disincentivize postconviction cooperation, especially regarding alleged misconduct at trial. This study empirically tests how prosecutorial misconduct at trial can affect postconviction proceedings by analyzing the relation between prosecutorial misconduct alleged at trial and the identification of a true perpetrator postconviction in DNA exoneration cases. Results demonstrate that, as predicted, prosecutorial misconduct is associated with a decrease in the odds of true perpetrator identification. This work further underscores the need for the implementation of functional policy to deter prosecutorial misconduct.
As the field of innocence scholarship continues to grow, we are excited by the launch of a new scholarly journal dedicated to this area of research. The Wrongful Conviction Law Review will be launching this year. From the website:
“The WCLR is an open source peer reviewed international journal focusing on wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice. While we are fundamentally a law review, we welcome submissions from other disciplines (e.g. criminology, sociology, psychology etc.). We aim to be the foremost repository of articles, book reviews and case commentaries in our field of endeavour. The Review has a preference for submitted papers to be between 8,000 and 12,000 words. Longer papers will be published where the length is justified. Matters of style and citation are governed by the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (8th ed.) or APA (7th ed.).
We will publish high-quality, original, empirical and theoretical research.
The WCLR seeks to foster dialogue and collaberation between scholars, jurists and practitioners.”
For more information about the journal, its editorial board, or to submit a paper, check out the website here.
A new article by Robert Norris and Kevin Mullinix explores how wrongful convictions affect public opinion has been published online in the Journal of Experimental Criminology.
The paper examines the effects of both statistical or numerical information (i.e., numbers of wrongful convictions) and narratives (i.e., a story about a wrongful conviction) on public attitudes toward the justice system, including support for the death penalty, support for police reforms, trust in the justice system, and personal concern about wrongful convictions.
The full citation and abstract are below. More information is available here.
Discourse about criminal justice in the USA increasingly revolves around wrongful convictions. Research has documented the emergence of the “innocence frame,” but relatively little is known about its effects on public opinion. We utilize framing theory to examine how various presentations of wrongful conviction information affect attitudes toward the justice system and highlight the consequences of the innocence movement for public opinion.
We implement two survey experiments to test the effects of innocence information for criminal justice attitudes. In the first experiment, we test the impact of wrongful conviction numbers relative to a control group for death penalty support. In the second experiment, we analyze the effects—both separately and jointly—of exoneration numbers and a wrongful conviction narrative relative to a control group for attitudes toward the death penalty and police reform, trust in the justice system, and personal concern.
We demonstrate that the presentation of factual numbers of exonerations reduces support for capital punishment and erodes trust in the justice system, but fails to garner support for police reforms or increase personal concern about wrongful convictions. However, a narrative about an individual wrongful conviction predictably has more pronounced effects on death penalty attitudes and increases personal concern and support for police reform, but has little effect on trust in the justice system more broadly.
Wrongful convictions are consequential for public opinion, but the effects are contingent on how the information is framed and the attitudinal outcome of interest. Our findings have implications for criminal justice attitudes and policy, the innocence movement, and framing theory.
A study from Duke University researchers examines how crime type influences respondents’ evaluations of guilt. Click here for an article from Duke news on the new research.
The Innocence Scholarship Committee of the Innocence Network is seeking high quality social science, forensic science and legal scholarship for presentation at the 2019 Innocence Network Conference in Atlanta, GA on April 12 – 13. http://innocencenetwork.org/networkconference/
For more information, click here: Call for Papers IN Conference 2019 FINAL.
A new article from Belen Lowrey-Kinberg and colleagues was recently published in Crime & Delinquency. The article explores how innocents become suspects and enter the criminal justice system. The full citation and abstract are below. More information can be found here.
Lowrey-Kinberg, B., Senn, S. L., Dunn, K., Gould, J. B., & Hail-Jares, K. (2018). Origin of implication: How do innocent individuals enter the criminal justice system? Crime & Delinquency. Online first, doi: 10.1177/0011128718793618.
Drawing from the investigative policing literature, we develop a typology for how innocent defendants become suspects in criminal investigations. We use the Preventing Wrongful Convictions Project (PWCP) dataset and multivariate modeling to examine the case and defendant characteristics that predict how an innocent defendant became a suspect. We found that investigators identify suspects in eight primary ways. The most common in the PWCP dataset were victim/eyewitness identification, citizen identification, and intentional misidentification. Defendant’s race, age, criminal history, relationship to the victim, cognitive/mental status, and whether the victim survived were strongly associated with an innocent defendant’s origin of implication. These results illuminate how tunnel vision begins in cases with innocent defendants, and how police practices may prevent innocent individuals from becoming suspects.
From Northern Illinois University Law Review:
Thanks to Vanessa Meterko at the Innocence Project for suggesting this resource!
Hosted by Prof. Frank R. Baumgartner at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Spring 2018, Mondays, 5:30 to 7:00 pm
Stone Center Auditorium, UNC Campus
Free parking is available after 5pm in the Bell Tower parking deck, adjacent to the Stone Center
All events are free and open to the public. Click here for the list of speakers and more information.
The Innocence Scholarship Committee is seeking social science and legal scholarship on wrongful convictions for presentation at the 2018 Innocence Network Conference. Paper proposals are due by January 16, 2018. For complete information, click the link below.
Innocence Research 