The police rely more on sophisticated surveillance technology in an era of increased anti-narcotics and counterterrorism efforts; GPS technology allows the rapid dispatch of police closest to an emergency; and advances in forensic science, particularly DNA evidence, have resulted in more accurate convictions and exonerations.
To calculate a more accurate false conviction rate, Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor and a former criminal defense lawyer, decided to focus on one small subset of criminal cases: those that result in death sentences.
He has called for a review of old cases where according to either the existing record, new evidence, or other grounds indicate that there's a question regarding guilt and innocence and/or another basis to call into question whether a conviction is accurate.
Defendants on death row have better access to attorneys, he notes, and more attention and resources are generally devoted to ensuring that their convictions are accurate.
Does that really provide an accurate enough basis for a conviction of this magnitude?" The Carmichaels' lawyers said they planned to appeal the verdicts.
But even among death sentence cases, dividing the number of known exonerations by the total number of defendants wouldn't give an accurate estimate of all false convictions.
Although that classification is accurate under U.S. law, those convictions didn't make the person more of a public threat, she argued.
A fair and accurate system not only prevents wrongful convictions, it more effectively identifies the guilty and strengthens public trust in our system of justice.
If you think forensic science is always accurate and results in mistake-proof crime convictions as portrayed on "CSI" and other TV crime dramas, a new report by the National Research Council strongly indicates otherwise.
"Hurricane," Dylan's highly specific, though not entirely accurate, account of the circumstances surrounding the murder conviction of the boxer Rubin Carter, was released in 1975, eight years after Carter went to prison.
