Category Archives: Scholarship

Keith Findley, President of the Innocence Network, has posted the above-titled chapter on SSRN.  Download here:  The summary says:

This short extract — the first four pages of Chapter 1 in an edited volume, Controversies in Innocence Cases in America — begins to describe the history and significance of the Innocence Movement in the American Criminal Justice System. The full chapter traces the origins of the innocence organizations that came together to form the Innocence Network and fostered the new Innocence Movement, the manner in which the Innocence Movement has created an impetus and model for criminal justice reform that shifts the focus from the Warren Court’s due process revolution of the 1960s to a more substantive focus on reliability. In this framework, the chapter then considers some of the specific reforms that have emerged from the Innocence Movement’s focus on substantive justice, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Daniel Epps has posted the above-titled article on SSRN.  Download here.   Abstract below.  I haven’t read the piece yet, but the friend who sent it to me read it and said, “These kids with their Harvard degrees and Supreme Court clerkships and no real experience in the criminal law trenches can be really scary.”   Have a read…Enjoy!

“Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer,” William Blackstone’s famous adage, stands for a powerful idea in the criminal law: that it’s essential to minimize wrongly convicting the innocent even at the expense of overall accuracy. This “Blackstone principle” accords with most people’s deeply felt intuitions about criminal justice.

This Article challenges that fundamental precept. It begins by situating the Blackstone principle in the history of Anglo-American criminal law. That history shows how the principle gained prominence — most notably, because in Blackstone’s time and earlier death was the exclusive penalty for many crimes — but provides no compelling justification today.

The leading modern argument for the Blackstone principle is that false convictions are simply more costly than false acquittals. But that argument is incomplete, because it focuses myopically on the costs of errors in individual cases. A complete analysis of the Blackstone principle requires taking stock of its dynamic effects on the criminal justice system as a whole. The Article conducts that analysis, which reveals two significant but previously unrecognized draw-backs of the Blackstone principle: First, its benefits to innocent defendants are smaller than usually assumed; it could even make those defendants worse off. Second, the principle reinforces a widely recognized political process failure in criminal justice, hurting not just defendants but society as a whole. The magnitude of these effects is uncertain, but they could more than cancel out the principle’s putative benefits.

The Article then analyzes alternative justifications for the Blackstone principle. None is satisfactory; each rests on dubious empirical premises, logical errors, or controversial premises. There is thus no fully persuasive justification for the principle. Rejecting the Blackstone principle would require us to re-think — although not necessarily redesign — various aspects of our criminal-procedure system.

Virginia professor Brandon Garrett has posted the above-titled article, reviewing several important books, on SSRN.  Download here.  The abstract states:

What is so haunting about the known wrongful convictions is that they are the tip of the iceberg. Untold numbers of mundane errors may escape notice while sending the innocent to prison and even to the death chamber. That is why I recommended to readers a trilogy of fascinating new books that look into the larger but murkier problem of error. In this article for Michigan Law Review’s annual book issue, I review three books: Los Tocayos Carlos, by James Liebman, Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White and Daniel Zharkovsky; Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, by Raymond Bonner; and In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process, by Dan Simon. Each of these books brings important new perspective and understanding to the reasons why our criminal justice system can make terrible mistakes.