Foundational Concepts
Wrongful Conviction
Also Known As Miscarriage of Justice
Citation Formats
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The conviction of a person for a crime they did not commit, arising from causes including coerced confessions, mistaken eyewitness identification, unreliable forensic testimony and inadequate legal defense. Organizations such as the Innocence Project use DNA testing to identify and reverse wrongful convictions.
Facts
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Eyewitness misidentification plays a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing.
29 percent of DNA-based exonerations tracked by the Innocence Project involved a false confession.
The Innocence Project uses DNA testing to identify and reverse wrongful convictions.
Exemplified By Cases
Why this is disputed. Amanda Knox's 2007 conviction was overturned on appeal, reinstated, and finally quashed by Italy's highest court in 2015; unlike the Central Park Five or West Memphis Three, no alternative perpetrator was conclusively established for the wider public record on Knox's own conviction, so its use as a wrongful-conviction exemplar is treated here as debated rather than settled.
Five teenagers served years in prison before DNA evidence and Matias Reyes's confession exonerated them in 2002.
The defendants were released in 2011 through an Alford plea after DNA testing exposed the investigative failures.
Informed By
Sources
1. Innocence Project: About
Mission & Values sectionQuote, Mission & Values section
The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone.
1. Innocence Project: About
Mission and Values sectionQuote, Mission and Values section
The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone.
1. Innocence Project: About
1. Innocence Project: About
Wikipedia: West Memphis Three
Wikipedia: Central Park Jogger Case
Exemplified By Cases: Central Park Jogger Case, Exoneration sectionQuote, Exemplified By Cases: Central Park Jogger Case, Exoneration section
a prominent example of racial profiling, discrimination, and inequality in the legal system
Wikipedia: False Confession
Associated With: False Confession, Incidence sectionQuote, Associated With: False Confession, Incidence section
the Innocence Project reports that since 1989, 375 offenders have been exonerated by DNA evidence. Twenty-nine percent of them confessed to the crime for which they were convicted and later exonerated.
Wikipedia: Eyewitness Identification
Associated With: Eyewitness Misidentification, Reliability sectionQuote, Associated With: Eyewitness Misidentification, Reliability section
Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.
Wikipedia: Murder of Meredith Kercher
Frequently Asked Questions
How common are wrongful convictions?
There is no single agreed figure, because it depends on the collecting body and its definition. The Innocence Project reports that eyewitness misidentification played a role in about 69 percent of the more than 375 DNA-based exonerations it has tracked in the United States between 1989 and 2020. That figure describes DNA exonerations specifically, a small, unusually well-documented subset of wrongful convictions, not the rate of wrongful conviction across the whole justice system, which cannot be measured directly because most wrongful convictions are never identified as such.Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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