City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Wrongful convictions and the DNA revolution, twenty-five years of freeing the innocent, [edited by] Daniel S. Medwed, Northeastern University School of Law

eng

index present

non fiction

Wrongful convictions and the DNA revolution

dictionaries

[edited by] Daniel S. Medwed, Northeastern University School of Law

twenty-five years of freeing the innocent

For centuries, most people believed the criminal justice system worked - that only guilty defendants were convicted. DNA technology shattered that belief. DNA has now freed more than three hundred innocent prisoners in the United States. This book examines the lessons learned from twenty-five years of DNA exonerations and identifies lingering challenges. By studying the dataset of DNA exonerations, we know that precise factors lead to wrongful convictions. These include eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, dishonest informants, poor defense lawyering, weak forensic evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. In Part I, scholars discuss the efforts of the Innocence Movement over the past quarter century to expose the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and to implement lasting reforms. In Part II, another set of researchers looks ahead and evaluates what still needs to be done to realize the ideal of a more accurate system

Foreword / Barry Scheck & Peter Neufeld -- Talking about a revolution : a quarter century of DNA exonerations / Daniel S. Medwed -- Innocence before dna / Michael Meltsner -- Convicting the innocent redux / Brandon L. Garrett -- Has the innocence movement become an exoneration movement? : the risks and rewards of redefining innocence / Richard A. Leo -- Negotiating accuracy : DNA in the age of plea bargaining / Alexandra Natapoff -- Reacting to recantations / Rob Warden -- A tale of two innocence clinics : client representation and legislative advocacy / Jacqueline McMurtrie -- How DNA has changed contemporary death penalty debates / Michael L. Radelet -- What does innocence have to do with cruel and unusual punishment? / Robert J. Smith, G. Ben Cohen & Zoe Robinson -- Flawed science and the new wave of innocents / Keith A. Findley -- Prosecutors: the thin last line protecting the innocent / George C. Thomas III -- Ineffective assistance of counsel and the innocence revolution : a standards-based approach procedural changes / Adele Bernhard -- Post-conviction procedure : the next frontier in innocence reform / Stephanie Roberts Hartung -- Can we protect the innocent without freeing the guilty? : thoughts on innocence reforms that avoid harmful tradeoffs / Paul G. Cassell -- Retrospective justice in the age of innocence : the hard case of rape executions / Margaret Burnham -- Outbreaks of injustice : responding to systemic irregularities in the criminal justice system / Sandra Guerra Thompson & Robert Wicoff -- Exonerating the innocent : habeas for nonhuman animals / Justin F. Marceau & Steven Wise -- The global innocence movement / Mark Godsey -- Innocence at war / Erik Luna