Professor Knoops’ work functions not only as an essential textbook but also as a practical guide for practitioners on the procedural mechanisms available to them after they have exhausted all locally available remedies for redressing miscarriages of justice. Redressing Miscarriages of Justice in (Inter)national Criminal Cases succinctly analyzes techniques and practices before both national courts and international criminal tribunals, attempting to answer such questions as “when is a conviction safe or unsafe” and “when and how to assess and introduce fresh evidence to reopen a criminal case.” While addressing, inter alia, the role of human rights protection and forensic sciences in this area, the text develops a legal framework which is instrumental for practitioners dealing with review procedures before domestic courts (U.S., U.K., Canada, the Netherlands) and international criminal tribunals such as the ICTY, ICTR and ICC. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

The essays selected for this volume develop conventional abolition discourse and explore the conceptual framework through which abolition is understood and posited. Of particular interest is the attention given to an integral but often forgotten element of the abolition debate: alternatives to capital punishment. The volume also provides an account of strategies employed by the abolition community which challenges tired methodologies and offers a level of transparency previously unseen. This collection tackles complex but fundamental components of the capital punishment debate using empirical data and expert observations and is essential reading for those wishing to comprehend the fundamental issues which underpin capital punishment discourse.

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.