Wrongful Convictions Blog

A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, supports the link between sleep deprivation and false confessions. Lawrence Sherman, Director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, has called it a “milestone.” New Science magazine reports, “…legal experts are predicting it will be cited in future court cases.”

From the Study: “Here we demonstrate that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood that a person will falsely confess to wrongdoing that never occurred. Furthermore, our data suggest that it may be possible to identify certain individuals who are especially likely to falsely confess while sleep deprived. The present research is a crucial step toward Continue reading →

By: Keith Findlay

Keith Findley is an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he is co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. He represented Steven Avery, subject of the “Making a Murderer” documentary, in the 2005 proceedings that produced DNA evidence to prove Avery’s innocence and exonerate him of a 1985 sexual assault conviction.

If, as the Supreme Court has consistently declared, the presumption of innocence is among the most fundamental principles in our criminal justice system, it is also among the most fragile.

The presumption is under constant assault from jurors’ natural assumption that if someone is arrested and charged with a crime, he or she must have done something wrong. It is also vulnerable to the media frenzy around high-profile cases, the fear-driven politics of crime, the highly punitive nature of our culture and the innate cognitive processes that produce tunnel vision and confirmation bias.

Indeed, research suggests that the presumption of innocence exists more in theory than reality. In studies, mock jurors predict a 50 percent chance of voting to convict — before hearing any evidence. Other research shows that while simulated jurors initially assign low probabilities of guilt, they abandon the presumption of innocence promptly as prosecution evidence is introduced.

[Why Scott Walker simply will not issue a pardon in response to ‘Making a Murderer’]

Given these natural inclinations, one would think a system built on the presumption of innocence would protect and reinforce that presumption. But in many ways, it does not.

Pretrial bail policies, for example, are not based on assessments of any likelihood of innocence or the need for innocent people to prepare for their defense, but solely on the risk that the (presumably guilty) accused might not appear for trial. On this score, the presumption of guilt accelerated in the early 1970s when notions of preventive detention — that is, complete denial of bail — emerged as part of the Nixon administration’s mission to control “criminals” before they committed crimes.

Continue Reading…

From: The Guardian

Tyra Patterson says she was an innocent teenage bystander who ran away from a murder. Prosecutors say she was party to a killing. In the first chapter of a Guardian special report, explore how a young woman from poverty-stricken Ohio fell victim to America’s addiction to incarceration – and what might still set her free

Prisoner 037737 has been locked up for 21 years and counting. In America, that is not very exceptional. You could say it’s almost ordinary.

Step back beyond the cell here in Ohio, a state which by itself has almost 70,000 people in prison and jail, and No 037737 becomes a grain of sand buried in a desert of incarceration. There are 2.2 million people locked up in the US – more than 100,000 of them women.
Today, the 7,787th day behind bars for Prisoner 037737, one out of every 110 adult Americans lives under the lock and key of the planet’s largest jailer: the United States of America. That represents almost one-quarter of the world’s total prison population, and almost one-third of the world’s incarcerated female population.

Prisoner 037737 is also black, which makes this American life all the more unexceptional. In Ohio, the ratio of incarcerated black people to the general African American population is almost six times the equivalent ratio for white people. Nationally, one in 18 black women can expect to be imprisoned at some point in their lives – a quotient that rises, for black men, to one in three.

But cold numbers can only teach you so much about mass incarceration in America today. Because Prisoner 037737 is also a person. She has a name. Her name is Tyra Patterson.

Tyra Patterson proclaims her innocence in crimes that have taken her away from her family and the outside world since the age of 19. Now 40, she has been gathering new evidence she believes will clear her in the murder of a 15-year-old girl, Michelle Lai, in 1994.

For six months the Guardian has been exploring Patterson’s life story, tracking her journey from elementary school dropout in poverty-stricken Dayton, Ohio, to a life sentence in the city’s female prison. The story that emerges is one woman’s struggle to have her claim of innocence heard within a system resistant to listening anymore.
“A tragedy happened in this case: Michelle Lai didn’t get to live her life,” David Singleton, the executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center and associate professor at NKU Chase College of Law who is Patterson’s current attorney, said. “Tyra Patterson is alive, but she has been branded a murderer and her life has been taken away from her. The greatest tragedy of Tyra’s case is that she had a story of innocence to tell, and it never got told.”

Beginning today, with two diverging accounts of a murder, that story will be told.
But this is no re-trial: it’s the story of an American criminal justice system ​in which questionable convictions are secured and then doggedly upheld, swallowing up thousands of vulnerable people in the process.

Along the way, we hope to provide surprising clues as to how a life behind bars came to be so very unexceptional – so ordinary – in 2016, in the land of the free.

Continue Reading…