Partial Research Paper into the Criminal Justice System of America, showing that Wrongful Convictions, though bad and heartbreaking, are an inevitable tradeoff as part of the Criminal Justice System.

1. Wrongful Conviction:
Inevitable Trade-off
Detrick Campbell
Sociology 1003: Introduction to Criminal Justice
1 April 2015

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When the concept of justice appears, many think of Lady Justice adorning courtrooms
around the world. She is usually wearing a blindfold for impartiality, carrying a sword for
vengeance and a scale of balanced arguments. However, it is impossible to have absolute justice
in this world: some have dodged Lady Justice’s sword, have tipped the scales in their favour and
have held the eyes of Lady Justice. Wrongful conviction is a problem that presents itself not only
in the United States of America but also in all countries around the world including the
Netherlands, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Australia. Nevertheless, wrongful
convictions or the miscarriages of justice are an inevitable trade-off in the criminal justice
systemin the United States of America.
Such groups like the Innocence Project would strongly disagree with the principle
statement of this paper. The organisation has stated, “Wrongful Convictions have shown that our
criminal justice system needs immediate reform in many areas” (Innocent Project n.d.).
However, the criminal justice system is inherently layered with mistakes. The Innocence Project
claims that some of the most common reasons for a wrongful conviction are eyewitness
misidentification, government misconduct, false confessions, bad lawyering and mistakes in
forensics, which are based on human error and can never be completely eliminated. This furthers
the idea that wrongful convictions are inevitable because the criminal justice system is imperfect
and always will be imperfect. The Innocence Project would therefore argue the need for more
emphasis on legislation to prevent the effects of human error such as improved evidence
preservation and eyewitness identification reform. The response to this is three-fold: first,
legislation will not completely eliminate human error; it will simply mitigate it. Second,
legislation, be it on the local, state and federal level, requires collective action, which can be very
difficult. Legislatures need to come together and do a plethora of tasks to fine tune a bill so that it

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can be passed. Finally, this legislation asks for things that the Honourable J. Harvie Wilkinson III
states as “[going] too far” (Wilkinson III 2014). Both this paper and the Honourable Wilkinson
III agree that there are aspects of the criminal justice system that need improvements; however,
cumbersome additions to trials and excluding very relevant evidence are not solutions to
wrongful conviction, but rather add stress to the already over-capacitated justice system that
would more than likely add to the number of wrongful convictions. A report from the National
Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals in 1973 advocates that barrister
take no more than 150 felonies each year or no more than 400 misdemeanours each year.
However, according to the American Bar Association barristers in the United States receive an
average of 153 cases per year with an average caseload of 78 carried over from the previous
year. Consequently, adding to an already exhausted system will ensure that justice is not careful
and thoroughly carried out.
Wrongful convictions are an inevitable trade-off because the term can be interpreted in a
multitude of ways. Wrongful convictions present a problem within themselves because “by
definition we do not know when [false convictions] occur. If we did, innocent defendants would
not be convicted in the first place” (Wilkinson III 2014). Many people assume that a court
decision is enough to completely determine if someone is guilty of a crime; however, this is false
because there is no absolute certainty. All evidence can be manipulated and presented in a way to
fool the jury. For example, former prosecutor Ken Anderson “withheld crucial evidence” in a
case that is responsible for Michael Morton to spend 25 years in prison (Newman 2013).
Likewise, evidence, or the lack thereof, does not guarantee guilt or innocence. For example, a
Florida man named Chad Heins was exonerated but was guilty of major tax fraud (Schoettler
2015). There is also the fact that even after DNA tests exonerated Jimmy Bromgard, Attorney

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General Mike McGarth stated, while under oath, that he believe Bromgard is guilty(Possley
2007). A court will never have all the information needed to absolutely determine the innocence
or guilty of a person. That not only leads to faults in convictions, but faults in the entire justice
system from arrest to corrections.
Additionally, it is difficult to examine the vast discrepancies of how often this event
actually happens. As Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has said, “that would
make the error rate [in felony convictions] .027 per cent—or, to put it another way, a success rate
of 99.973 per cent” (Risinger 2007). Meanwhile, other case studies put the estimate of wrongful
convictions between 2.5% and 10% (Brants 2012). That is significantly different from the 0.5%
found in 1996 (Leo and Gould 2009). The inability to study this problem accurately greatly
hinders the process of finding any type of solution in the criminal justice system and allows
wrongful conviction to continue. The Austin Chronicles states, “false convictions happen in
nearly every type of case,” and, “for a number of different reasons” (Smith 2012). Many scholars
simply use cite the most common reason for wrongful conviction like bad lawyering or false
confessions; however, these are not the only cause. That means getting rid of them will not
eliminate wrongful conviction. Therefore, it is difficult to identify the aspect that pertain
wrongful conviction. Moreover, instead of stopping wrongful convictions the best the fix would
be as Samuel Gross said, “finding and correcting them as best we can after the fact.”
The methodology for legal scholarship presents itself as a problem as well. Legal
methodology follows a logical prescription that is more reliant on simple cause and effect,
whereas the natural and social sciences have a much more empirical approach. Richard A. Leo
and Jon B. Gould state, “It is not surprising that legal research on erroneous convictions should
appear this way, since law school teaches that wrongs have causes, that causes can be prevented,

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and that injuries from an unacceptable cause warrant recompense to the victim and punishment
to the wrongdoer” (Huff, Rattner and Sagarin 1996). The natural and social sciences in general
are used to gather knowledge and information in order to understand how the world is rather than
how the world ought to be, the focus of the realm of legal studies. Thus, legal studies produce a
simple explanation and answer without possibly resolving a deeper issue. Leo and Gould go on
to state, “many of the same factors that are present in cases that lead to wrongful convictions are
also present in cases that lead to both rightful acquittals and rightful convictions” (Leo and
Gould 2009). What that means is that during a cases, be it wrong or right, certain aspects always
present themselves such as a judge, a prosecutor, defendant and a jury (unless the right is
waived). And, it is not these aspect alone that result in wrongful conviction; it is a degree of error
present thoroughout the case, which legal scholars omit. As a result, the limited scope of legal
methodology perpetuates the inevitability of wrongful convictions.
Moreover, juries have nearly unlimited power on the conviction on persons accused,
which is detrimental because of biases and prejudices. “Most Americans harbour the
presumption that their criminal justice system is fair and blind. Within that a priori delusion, an
assumption is made that no person shall ever be convicted for a crime that he or she did not
commit” (Jones 2012). However, having juries in the criminal justice system does not eliminate
biases and prejudicies. Juries usually have the final decision on whether the accused is guilty. A
jury can very well use the tactic of jury nullification to acquit a defendant regardless of evidence
against the defendant. While on the other hand, a jury can invoke its right to find a defendant
guilty regardless of the ability of the persecutor to present a proof beyond a reasonable doubt as
well. There are checks for this in the court system such as a challenge for cause, juror removal

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because of bias of prior knowledge about the case, and peremptory challenge, removal of a juror
for discretionary reasons. As a result, the jury decides to convict even if it is wrongfully.
The criminal justice system is a complex process that helps to facilitate wrongful
convictions. In the United States of America, the criminal justice system is adversarial and not
inquisitorial like that of New Zealand or the Netherlands. These means that the accused can
question witnesses; nonetheless, it also means that the accused has to provide a more convincing
story than the prosecutor. For example, the accused may be innocent but the prosecutor is better
at persuasive argumentation to convince the jury that he or she is guilty. The criminal justice
system in the Untied States by the Constitution and the court system also guarantee certain
rights. For example, all persons accused of a crime have the right to counsel. The accused also
have the right to cross-examine witnesses and persons who testify in court. Nevertheless, the
accused can waive these rights at any time, leaving them susceptible to the vile attributes of the
criminal justice system. There are advantages to this system; however, it is disadvantageous
because there is the inevitable trade-off of being wrongfully convicted.
Wrongful convictions present a problem in the United States. There is a lack of
consensus on what ‘wrongful conviction’ actually means. Furthermore, wrongful convictions are
difficult to analyse using statistics because there are many reasons for wrongful convictions in
many different types of case; therefore, fix is finding and correcting them after the fact. Our legal
methodology fails to adequately examine the phenomenon because it looks for a simple cause
instead of look at the multifaceted problem that it is. Juries are another source of hardship in the
criminal justice system because there are biases and prejudices that can influence a trial in the
wrong way. In general, the complex process of the criminal justice system, though somewhat
advantageous, leaves a lot of room for error. The complex nature of wrongful convictions in the

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American justice system may mean that the solution is not in the court system, but in another
aspect of life.

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Works Cited
American Bar Association. CHART IV: CASELOAD STATISTICS 2010. Chart, Chicago:
American Bar Association, 2012.
American Prosecutors Research Institute. How Many Cases Should A Prosecutor Handle?
Research Report, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Alexandria,:
Bureau of Justice Assitance, 2002.
Brants, Chrisje. "Wrongful Convictions and Inquisitorial Process: The Case of the Netherlands."
University of Cincinnati Law Review 80, no. 4 (2012): 46.
Gross, Samuel R. "Convicting the Innocent." The Annual Review of Law and Social Science,
2008: 173-194.
Huff, C R, A Rattner, and E Sagarin. "Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public
Policy." National Criminal Justice Reference Service, 1996: 198.
Jones, Joshua A. Wrongful Conviction in the American Judicial Process: History, Scope and
Analysis. 2012. http://www.studentpulse.com/a?id=682 (accessed January 31, 2015).
Leo, Richard A., and Jon B. Gould. "Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning from Social
Sciecne." Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 7, no. 7 (2009): 7-30.
Newman, Alex. "First Prosecutor Jailed for Deliberately Convicting Innocent Man." The New
American, November 23, 2013: 1.
Possley, Maurice. "Exonerated by DNA, guilty in official's eyes." Chicago Tribune, May 28,
2007: 1.
Risinger, D. Michael. "Innocents Convicted: An Empirically Justified Factual Wrongful
Conviction Rate." The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Northwestern
University) 97, no. 3 (2007): 761-806.

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Schoettler, Jim. "Chad Heins, exonerated in Mayport murder, pleads guilty to tax fraud." Florida
TImes Union, March 26, 2015: 2.
Smith, Jordan. "The Problem of Wrongful Conviction, New registry details nearly 900 cases."
The Austin Chronicle, May 21, 2012.
Wilkinson III, J. Harvie. "In Defense of American Criminal Justice." Vanderbilt Law Review 64,
no. 4 (2014): 1099-1172.
Zalman, Marvin. "Criminal Justice System Reform adn Wrongful Conviction." Criminal Justice
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