Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the "innocence revolution" has shaken the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and ineffective assistance of counsel. The second edition provides an expanded treatment of certain critical topics. The reader now includes an entire chapter devoted to race and wrongful convictions and provides expanded treatment of the intersections between gender, sexual orientation, and disability and wrongful conviction. The addition of these topics in expanded form creates new options for instructors to explore timely topics in the field of compelling concern to many contemporary students. As before, the book remains more than a mere 'reader' of literature in the field, but rather a book that can serve as the principal text in doctrinal as well as experiential courses. Each chapter is divided into three sections that include: readings, current law overview--which summarizes the key cases in the area; and legal materials, exercises, and media--which provides relevant experiential activities. Examples from the legal materials, exercises, and media sections includes: Recommended listening and viewing: timed excerpts from podcast episodes, films, and television clips; Oral advocacy exercises: mock bail arguments, parole hearings, testimony before the state legislature, presentations to the state rules committee, appellate oral arguments; Written advocacy exercises: practice motions and comparing state statutes; Issue spotting exercises: transcripts from interrogations and in-court testimony; Review: reflective essays, short answer questions, and true/false questions; Team exercises: plea negotiations; Discussion prompts; and Actual wrongful conviction case documents.

Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the "innocence revolution" is shaking the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel.

"Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the "innocence revolution" has shaken the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and ineffective assistance of counsel. Each chapter is divided into three sections: Readings Current Law Overview-which summarizes the key cases in the area, and Legal Materials, Exercises, and Media-which provides relevant experiential activities. Examples from the Legal Materials, Exercises, and Media sections include: Recommended listening and viewing: timed excerpts from podcast episodes, films, and television clips Oral advocacy exercises: mock bail arguments, parole hearings, testimony before the state legislature, presentations to the state rules committee, appellate oral arguments Written advocacy exercises: practice motions and comparing state statutes Issue spotting exercises: transcripts from interrogations and in-court testimony Review: reflective essays, short answer questions, and true/false questions Team exercises: plea negotiations Discussion prompts Actual wrongful conviction case documents This combination of materials makes the book more than a mere "reader" and makes it ideal for doctrinal as well as experiential courses"--

Working with the Innocence Movement and Leigh Stubbs-a woman denied a fair trial largely due to her sexual orientation-a former federal prosecutor weaves Leigh's story through the broader story of a broken criminal system.

In Examining Wrongful Convictions: Stepping Back, Moving Forward, the premise is that much can be learned by "stepping back" from the focus on the direct causes of wrongful convictions and examining criminal justice systems, and the sociopolitical environments in which they operate. Expert scholars examine the underlying individual, systemic, and social or structural conditions that may help precipitate and sustain wrongful convictions, thereby "moving forward" the related scholarship.

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

Ten true tales of people falsely accused detail the flaws in the criminal justice system that landed these people in prison