Anyone who does innocence work in the U.S. is familiar with prosecutorial tunnel vision, stiff prosecutorial resistance to innocence claims, and all the nasty and unreasonable responses we often get from prosecutors that we tend to chalk up as a by-product of our adversarial system of justice.
After reading Huff and Killias’ book Wrongful Convictions: International Perspectives on Miscarriages of Justice, I became very interested in prosecutorial training and ethics in the inquisitorial justice systems of Western Europe. Many of the articles in the book depict the inquisitorial systems of justice as ones in which prosecutors take very seriously their duty to remain neutral and seek justice over victories. Anyone interested in this issue should read the Huff and Killias book, as they do a convincing job of highlighting some strengths in the inquisitorial systems. This book, and conversations with some of the authors in the book, caused me to say in a forthcoming article:
In recent years, I have spent quite a bit of time outside of the United States helping attorneys and scholars set up the framework for innocence organizations in their home countries. In Western European countries, where the systems are inquisitorial rather than adversarial, scholars tell me that the prosecutors are trained early on to seek the truth and to be as objective as possible. This Continue reading
Wrongful Convictions Blog 