Category Archives: Scholarship

“Shifted Science” and Post-Conviction Relief

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Mark Godsey | Leave a comment

The Michigan Innocence Clinic’s Imran Syed and Caitlan Plummer have posted the above-titled article, fresh off the presses, on SSRN.com. Download here. The abstract states:

Of the many known causes of wrongful convictions, perhaps the most complex and diverse is junk science. We explore here a long-overlooked subset of that category and ask the question: What can be done to cure the injustice of a conviction that was based on scientific testimony that may have been accepted in the relevant scientific community at the time of trial, but has since been completely repudiated? In such an Continue reading →

Is the Wrongful Conviction Rate 5%?

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Mark Godsey | 2 comments

D. Michael Resinger, a law professor at Seton Hall, has an article that all should read, if you haven’t already. It’s entitled Innocents Convicted: An Empirically Justified Wrongful Conviction Rate on SSRN.com. The abstract states:

That would make the error rate [in felony convictions] .027 percent – or to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent.

– Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in Kansas v. Marsh, June 29, 2006 (quoting Joshua Marquis)

The news about the astounding accuracy of felony convictions in the United States, delivered by Justice Scalia and Joshua Marquis in the passage set out epigrammatically above, would be cause for rejoicing if it were true. Imagine. Only 27 factually wrong felony convictions out of every 100,000! Unfortunately, it is not true, as the empirical data analyzed in this article demonstrates.

To a great extent, those who believe that our criminal justice system rarely convicts the factually innocent and those who believe such miscarriages are rife have generally talked past each other for want of any empirically-justified factual innocence wrongful conviction rate. This article remedies at least a part of this problem by establishing the first such empirically justified wrongful conviction rate ever for a significant universe of real world serious crimes: capital rape-murders in the 1980’s.

Using DNA exonerations for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 as a numerator, and a 406-member sample of the 2235 capital sentences Continue reading →