Wrongful Conviction, Error and Legal Defense

Concepts naming a specific way the criminal justice process can convict the wrong person or fail to determine guilt accurately: a conviction later shown to be factually incorrect, a confession given under pressure that does not reflect what actually happened, a witness's honest but mistaken identification of the wrong person, and a legal defense resting on the defendant's mental state at the time of the offense rather than on disputing the act itself. Belongs here: any concept naming a mechanism of wrongful conviction, evidentiary error, or a mental-state legal defense. Does not belong here: the investigative methods that produce evidence in the first place, grouped under Investigation and Evidence Concepts, unless the concept's defining content is specifically the way that evidence goes wrong.