American Criminal Law Review articles from September 2005

American Criminal Law Review archives from September 2005

How the pretrial process contributes to wrongful convictions.
September 22, 2005... Wrongful convictions have received a lot of recent attention, and properly so. The use of DNA evidence, coupled with the spectacular work of various innocence projects, has shown that despite all the procedural protections built into the...

Lost innocence: speculation and data about the acquitted.
September 22, 2005... "Trial by jury is not an instrument for getting at the truth; it is a process designed to make it as sure as possible that no innocent man is convicted." (1) "I view the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal case as...

System failure.(criminal justice)
September 22, 2005... The release of an innocent person from prison has become a recurring public event, varying only by the facts of the case and the apparent cause of wrongful conviction. (1) Sometimes the underlying problem is official misconduct; occasionally...

Moving down the wedge of injustice: a proposal for a third generation of wrongful convictions scholarship and advocacy.
September 22, 2005... The Innocence Project and its allies in the wrongful convictions movement (1) have much to be proud of. In a first wave of activity, they have freed more than 150 innocent people from prison, (2) focused public attention on the prevalence of...

Evidence destroyed, innocence lost: the preservation of biological evidence under innocence protection statutes.
September 22, 2005... In 1997, Texas governor George W. Bush issued a pardon to Kevin Byrd, a man convicted of sexually assaulting a pregnant woman while her two-year old daughter lay asleep beside her. (1) As part of the original criminal investigation, a medical...

The role of the social sciences in preventing wrongful convictions.
September 22, 2005... The lawyer alone is obdurate. The lawyer and the judge and the juryman are sure that they do not need the experimental psychologist. They do not wish to see that in this field preeminently applied experimental psychology has made strong...

The Criminal Cases Review Commission as a state strategic selection mechanism.
September 22, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION Legal scholars have come a long way in establishing the fact of wrongful conviction. No longer do we wonder whether wrongful convictions take place, but rather, we focus our concern on how they happen and how the problems...