Wrongful Convictions Blog

There is a dark side to the feel-good story about Spotlight being named the best movie of year at the Oscars last night, JoAnn Wypijewski says. The Boston Globe’s investigative series of articles exposing priest pedophilia celebrated in Spotlight, she argues, fueled a moral panic that imprisoned the innocent as well as the guilty.

“By their nature, moral panics are hysterical. They jettison reason for emotion, transform accusation into proof, spur more accusation and create a climate that demands not deliberation or evidence or resistance to prejudice but mindless faith,” Wypijewski says here.

What Hollywood celebrated last night, she adds, was “the bunk of recovered memory; the Globe reporters’ failure to challenge any charlatan who embraces it; and the lure of money.”

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 →