By Hayley Stillwell.
“[I]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” The principle that a criminal justice system should err on the side of acquittals—even acquittals of the guilty—to avoid convicting the innocent is a cornerstone of the American criminal justice system. It is reflected in many defendant-friendly system features, including the criminal defendant’s presumption of innocence and the government’s high burden of proof required to convict. Notwithstanding these and other protections for the criminal defendant, the American criminal justice system has wrongfully convicted thousands of innocent persons of crimes.
This failure of the system is both indisputable and common knowledge. Even so, only a portion of the wrongful conviction problem gets the attention of the public, researchers, and reformers. Sparked by advances in DNA testing, exonerations of criminal defendants convicted with flawed evidence—from eyewitness misidentifications to debunked bite-mark evidence—have dominated the wrongful conviction narrative. However, flawed evidence is only one cause of the wrongful conviction problem. Full Article.