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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:11 pm
Time: 8:11 pm
Results for wrongful conviction
4 results foundAuthor: Sangero, Boaz Title: Safety from False Convictions Summary: This book provides readers with an exploration of ways to reduce the rate of false convictions in the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system should be seen as a Safety-Critical System, specifically a system that deals with matters of life and death, where any error is likely to cause grave harm to both the individual and society. Implementing safety in criminal law is necessary, both morally and economically. Incorporating into the criminal justice system a modern safety theory that is commonly accepted in other areas, such as space, aviation, engineering, and transportation, is an idea that was developed jointly by myself and Dr. Mordechai Halpert and presented mainly in the coauthored article "A Safety Doctrine for the Criminal Justice System." This is the starting point of the book. The book expands the preliminary proposition and engages in the application of the modern safety theory and methods in the criminal justice system. Thus, for example, the book demonstrates how the fundamentally important Identify-Analyze-Control method can and should be implemented in the system, using Nancy Leveson's STAMP's model ("System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes"). This is the first book that proposes a general theory of safety for the criminal justice system. It provides specific safety rules for certain types of criminal evidence and criminal law procedures. Details: Ramat Gan, Israel: The Author, 2016. 256p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 29, 2016 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2816292 Year: 2016 Country: International URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2816292 Shelf Number: 140077 Keywords: Criminal LawEyewitness TestimonyFalse ConvictionsInnocencePlea BargainingWrongful Conviction |
Author: Fair Punishment Project Title: Too Broken to Fix: Part II An In-depth Look at America's Outlier Death Penalty Counties Summary: The two-part report titled Too Broken to Fix: An In-depth Look at America's Outlier Death Penalty Counties, examined 10 years of court opinions and records from these 16 "outlier counties." Part II focuses on Dallas (TX), Jefferson (AL), Pinellas (FL), Miami-Dade (FL), Hillsborough (FL), Los Angeles (CA), San Bernardino (CA), and Orange (CA). Part I, which was released in August, looked at Caddo Parish (LA), Clark (NV), Duval (FL), Harris (TX), Maricopa (AZ), Mobile (AL), Kern (CA) and Riverside (CA). The report also analyzed all of the new death sentences handed down in these counties since 2010. The report notes that these "outlier counties" are plagued by persistent problems of overzealous prosecutors, ineffective defense lawyers, and racial bias. Researchers found that the impact of these systemic problems included the conviction of innocent people, and the excessively harsh punishment of people with significant impairments. Many of the defendants appear to have one or more impairments that are on par with, or worse than, those that the U.S. Supreme Court has said should categorically exempt individuals from execution due to lessened culpability. The Court previously found that individuals with intellectual disabilities (Atkins v. Virginia, 2002) and juveniles under the age of 18 (Roper v. Simmons, 2005) should not be subject to the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment. In conducting its analysis, the Project reviewed nearly 400 direct appeals opinions handed down between 2006 and 2015 in these 16 counties. The Project found: Fifty-six percent of cases involved defendants with significant mental impairments or other forms of mitigation, such as the defendant's young age. Approximately one out of every six cases involved a defendant who was under the age of 21 at the time of the offense. Forty percent of cases involved a defendant who had an intellectual disability, brain damage, or severe mental illness. In eight of the 16 counties, half or more of the defendants had mental impairments, including: Pinellas (67 percent), Maricopa (62 percent), Mobile (60 percent), Caddo Parish and Miami-Dade (both had 57 percent), and Kern, Hillsborough, and San Bernardino counties (each had 50 percent). Approximately one in ten cases involved a finding of prosecutorial misconduct. The counties with the highest rates of misconduct include: Maricopa (47 percent), Miami-Dade (29 percent), and Clark (21 percent). Bad lawyering was a persistent problem across all of the counties. In most of the counties, the average mitigation presentation at the penalty phase of the trial lasted less than one and half days. During the mitigation phase, the defense lawyer is supposed to present all of the evidence showing that the defendant's life should be spared - including testimony from mental health and other experts. This presentation can last several weeks if the lawyers prepare properly. While this is just one data point for determining the quality of legal representation, this finding reveals appalling inadequacies. This type of mitigation evidence can also be used pre-trial to negotiate a plea agreement. Additional findings: Ten of the 16 counties had at least one person released from death row since 1976. These 10 counties account for more than 10 percent of all death row exonerations nationwide. Out of all of the death sentences obtained in these counties between 2010 and 2015, 46 percent were given to African-American defendants, and 73 percent were given to people of color. In Jefferson, 100 percent of defendants sentenced to die between 2010 and 2015 were African-American. In Duval that figure was 87 percent and in Dallas it was 88 percent. In Harris, 100 percent of the defendants who were newly sentenced to death since November 2004 have been people of color. The race of the victim is also a significant factor in who is sentenced to death in many of these counties. The report noted that in 14 of the 16 counties, not a single white person received a death sentence for killing a Black person. In contrast, in 14 out of 16 counties, at least one Black person was sentenced to death for the killing of a white person. In Orange County 60 percent of the victims were white in the cases involving a Black defendant, even though research has shown that the vast majority of homicides are committed intra-race. Five of the 16 "outlier counties" are from Florida and Alabama, the only two states that currently allow non-unanimous jury verdicts. Just eight out of 71 cases we reviewed from these five counties had a unanimous jury verdict; 89 percent were non-unanimous. Details: s.l.: Fair Punishment Project, 2016. 54p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 13, 2016 at: http://fairpunishment.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/FPP-TooBroken_II.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: http://fairpunishment.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/FPP-TooBroken_II.pdf Shelf Number: 145086 Keywords: Capital PunishmentDeath PenaltyPublic OpinionRacial DisparitiesWrongful Conviction |
Author: Gross, Samuel R. Title: Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States Summary: African Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in "group exonerations." We see this racial disparity for all major crime categories, but we examine it in this report in the context of the three types of crime that produce the largest numbers of exonerations in the Registry: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes. I. Murder • Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others. • African-American prisoners who are convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers. Part of that disparity is tied to the race of the victim. African Americans imprisoned for murder are more likely to be innocent if they were convicted of killing white victims. Only about 15% of murders by African Americans have white victims, but 31% of innocent African-American murder exonerees were convicted of killing white people. • The convictions that led to murder exonerations with black defendants were 22% more likely to include misconduct by police officers than those with white defendants. In addition, on average black murder exonerees spent three years longer in prison before release than white murder exonerees, and those sentenced to death spent four years longer. • Many of the convictions of African-American murder exonerees were affected by a wide range of types of racial discrimination, from unconscious bias and institutional discrimination to explicit racism. • Most wrongful convictions are never discovered. We have no direct measure of the number of all convictions of innocent murder defendants, but our best estimate suggests that they outnumber those we know about many times over. Judging from exonerations, half of those innocent murder defendants are African Americans. II. Sexual Assault • Judging from exonerations, a black prisoner serving time for sexual assault is threeand-a-half times more likely to be innocent than a white sexual assault convict. The major cause for this huge racial disparity appears to be the high danger of mistaken eyewitness identification by white victims in violent crimes with black assailants. • Assaults on white women by African-American men are a small minority of all sexual assaults in the United States, but they constitute half of sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentifications that led to exoneration. (The unreliability of cross-racial eyewitness identification also appears to have contributed to racial disparities in false convictions for other crimes, but to a lesser extent.) • Eyewitness misidentifications do not completely explain the racial disparity in sexual assault exonerations. Some misidentifications themselves are in part the products of racial bias, and other convictions that led to sexual assault exonerations were marred by implicit biases, racially tainted official misconduct and, in some cases, explicit racism. • African-American sexual assault exonerees received much longer prison sentences than white sexual assault exonerees, and they spent on average almost four-and-a-half years longer in prison before exoneration. It appears that innocent black sexual assault defendants receive harsher sentences than whites if they are convicted, and then face greater resistance to exoneration even in cases in which they are ultimately released. III. Drug Crimes • The best national evidence on drug use shows that African Americans and whites use illegal drugs at about the same rate. Nonetheless, African Americans are about five times as likely to go to prison for drug possession as whites—and judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about 12 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent white people. • In general, very few ordinary, low-level drug convictions result in exoneration, regardless of innocence, because the stakes are too low. In Harris County, Texas, however, there have been 133 exonerations in ordinary drug possession cases in the last few years. These are cases in which defendants pled guilty, and were exonerated after routine lab tests showed they were not carrying illegal drugs. Sixty-two percent of the Harris County drugcrime guilty plea exonerees were African American in a county with 20% black residents. • The main reason for this racial disproportion in convictions of innocent drug defendants is that police enforce drug laws more vigorously against African Americans than against members of the white majority, despite strong evidence that both groups use drugs at equivalent rates. African Americans are more frequently stopped, searched, arrested, and convicted—including in cases in which they are innocent. The extreme form of this practice is systematic racial profiling in drug-law enforcement. • Since 1989, more than 1,800 defendants have been cleared in “group exonerations” that followed 15 large-scale police scandals in which officers systematically framed innocent defendants. The great majority were African-American defendants who were framed for drug crimes that never occurred. There are almost certainly many more such cases that remain hidden. • Why do police officers who conduct these outrageous programs of framing innocent drug defendants concentrate on African Americans? The simple answer: Because that's what they do in all aspects of drug-law enforcement. Guilty or innocent, they always focus disproportionately on African Americans. Of the many costs that the War on Drugs inflicts on the black community, the practice of deliberately charging innocent defendants with fabricated crimes may be the most shameful. Details: Irvine, CA: National Registry of Exonerations, Newkirk Center for Science and Society, University of California Irvine, 2017. 37p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 7, 2017 at: https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf Shelf Number: 146414 Keywords: ExonerationsFalse ImprisonmentJudicial ErrorMiscarriage of JusticeRacial DisparitiesWrongful Conviction |
Author: Zalman, Marvin Title: The Anti-Blackstonians Summary: The writings of four authors - Daniel Epps, Larry Laudan (writing alone and with Ronald J. Allen) and Paul G. Casell - related to the Blackstone principle or the Blackstone ratio are analyzed and criticized herein. Their writings are labeled anti-Blackstonian because in my view view their programs would (1) seriously weaken defendants' rights, (2) not reduce wrongful convictions, and (3) not enhance public safety. This critique is written from the context of the innocence movement, analyses of criminologists related to the Blackstone ratio, and a deeply flawed criminal justice system Details: Detroit: Wayne State University, 2018. 114p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 30, 2018 at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3145185 Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3145185 Shelf Number: 150386 Keywords: Innocence MovementWrongful Conviction |