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APA
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Law
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Topic:

Wrongful conviction. Examine the National Registry of Exonerations.

Essay Instructions:

Your task is this assignment is to examine the National Registry of Exonerations and do two things:
1. Explain one of the six factors that contribute to wrongful conviction. Provide evidence for how frequently this factor is present in wrongful conviction cases. Does this factor co-occur with other factors? Why? Suggest some ways that the problem could be minimized. This should be about 1/2 of your paper.
These factors include:
a. Mistaken eyewitness identifications
b. False confessions
c. Perjury or False Accusation
d. Prosecutorial and police misconduct
e. Ineffective Counsel
f. False or misleading forensic evidence
I would encourage you use the reports in the National Registry of Exonerations website.
2. Identify an exonoree from the National Registry of Exonerations that was largely convicted due to the factor you identified in part 1. Using the narrative from the Registry, identify at least two newspaper sources that further flesh out the story. In as much detail as you can find - about the wrongful conviction, what happened, how the judicial system failed, and the primary reasons for the wrongful conviction. What does this case tell us about the criminal justice system?
Notes
In order to find an exonoree, you can use this:
http://www(dot)law(dot)umich(dot)edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx
Identify a list of exonorees by the contributing factor you selected in the National Registry of Exonerations. Select a category of cases.

Then sort by State if you like. Scroll through the list, and find an exoneree you want to write about and research.
If you can not find details on the case beyond the brief summaries online, pick another exoneree to write about. You will have better luck if you select individuals exonerated in the past five years
I would encourage you to do newspaper searches (for Illinois cases in the Chicago Tribune) or any other Newspaper website, or use Lexis Nexis from the Library
Your paper should be approximately 1200 words. It should be typed, double-spaced, fully documented using APA citation guidelines.
LINK TO REGISTRY http://www(dot)law(dot)umich(dot)edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Wrongful Conviction
Student's Name
Institutional Affiliation
Wrongful Conviction
Part 1
The increasing number of wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system does not serve justice to individuals. Instead, wrongful convictions increase the number of victims because it leaves the real criminals free. There is no pride in the criminal justice system if innocent individuals are proven guilty. The credibility and strength of the criminal justice system depend on its accuracy. In this regard, it expected that the guilty would be convicted while the innocent will be freed. Addressing and minimizing wrongful convictions requires an understanding of the contributing factors. When we understand the main factors leading to wrongful conviction, we will be able to create incentives for eliminating them in the criminal justice system. Notably, several factors have been found to contribute to the wrongful conviction of people. Among them are false confessions, which have been attributed to hundreds of cases across the United States.
For more than 20 years, numerous people were confirmed to be free and not guilty from the crimes that caused their imprisonment, which affirms that false confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions (Leo, 2009). The National Registry of Exonerations, it was established that 145 individuals were exonerated in 2019, which affirms the prevalence of wrongful convictions across the United States criminal justice system. According to Leo (2009), a police induced wrongful convictions. A false confession is usually an admission, with a post-admission narrative that gives detail of how and why the crime occurred that the convicted individual never committed. There are numerous causes of false confession, which include misclassification, coercion, and contamination. The false confessions induced by police officers are usually outcomes of multiple-step procedures and successive influence, persuading, and submission involving psychological coercion.
During the process of interrogation, police are likely to induce false confession in innocent people. People with particular personality traits are usually pressured into confessing falsely. Accusatorial interrogation, which coerces individuals to confessions, is when an innocent person is forced to confess to crimes he never committed. Getting confessions is usually essential when the police have not other evidence against the suspect, particularly in high-profile cases where officers are pressured to find a solution to the crime (Leo & Ofshe, 1998). In most cases, there is no evidence linking the accused with the crime and is usually a misclassified suspect. The process of interrogation forces the person to comply because he perceives that he has no other option but to comply with the police's wishes. Notably, officers can threaten or offer false promises, and this is further developed during interrogation. The circumstances of interrogation are the leading cause of false confession. The frequency of false confessions is very high due to the method employed by police when interrogating individuals (Gross & Possley, 2016).
In order to address the issues of police-induced false confessions, there is a need to transform the procedures f...
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