The peer-reviewed journal “Innocents convicted: an empirically justified factual wrongful conviction rate” authored by Michael D. Risinger, a law professor at Seton Hall Law School, writes this to explore the balance between the emphasis on minimizing arguably inevitable wrongful convictions and the effort to maintain a functional and effective criminal justice system. He first establishes a spectrum of viewpoints relating to the issue with Romillists on one end and Paleyites on the other. Romillists, who Risinger named after early 19th century reformist Samuel Romilly, would argue that protecting the rights of innocent people, thus avoiding wrongful convictions, is necessary to maintaining a just society at all and would promote reform that made it more difficult to convict guilt. This concedes that it is important and necessary to prevent wrongful convictions, even if it means larger amounts of guilty are allowed to run free. The Paleyite viewpoint on the other hand, named for 18th century utilitarian Rev. William Paley, argues that while it is clearly immoral and wrong to convict someone who is innocent, it is an inevitable part of an effective justice system and the risk of a wrongful conviction is a price every citizen must pay for the societal protection of that justice system. Risinger reviews cases and statistics throughout this journal that help find a middle ground on that spectrum. For this research assessment I focused on the last section of this journal, focusing on the moral obligation of people to try to exonerate the factually innocent, a term Risinger feels is more adequate for describing the wrongfully convicted, and attempt to limit wrongful convictions in the first place. This is pertinent to my research as it introduces a new idea that perhaps preventing wrongful convictions is simply impossible if maintaining a reasonable standard for proving guilt is a goal. This is something I need to look at in recommending reforms for justice.
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There are two separate areas of combatting this injustice in the justice system: making changes to conviction standards to help reduce future wrongful convictions and working to exonerate current inmates that are innocent. For my research I feel that it is perhaps a more reasonable goal to focus on exonerations as advances in areas such as DNA testing that was not available during their trials can help prove their innocence. Additionally, because of the lack of these testimonial resources in the past it is more likely that there are more innocent people serving time as their innocence could not be backed by DNA testing. I feel that in exploring these exonerations, the possible exoneration of some guilty people is a sacrifice that needs to be made. Risinger introduces the Blackstone ratio which argues that there is some sort of ideal ratio of wrongful convictions to correct ones that allows for a successful criminal justice system. He discredits this because he feels that this defends the fact that a certain portion of inmates are innocent. While this may need to be the case, putting a set number on the amount of innocents that will serve in prison would be completely disheartening to the prison population. This can be compared to the obvious notion that if an airplane crashed at a set rate, people would not fly airplanes. The current rate of wrongful convictions is estimated at 3.3%, meaning that thirty-three out of every thousand convictions is false. From a full scale perspective of the system as a whole this may seem like a fair ratio that accomplishes the goal of striking a reasonable balance on the spectrum discussed earlier. However, on a micro sociological level, focusing on the individual which in this case is the innocent inmate, the living nightmare of enduring a sentence that they know they are innocent of is simply unimaginable, and for even the most absolutist Romillist, this shows that even a ratio they may deem is ideal, they are not “morally off the hook” as put by Risinger. Additionally, as addressed in prior research, wrongful convictions not only ruin the life of an innocent person, but fail to bring the true perpetrator to justice. This again ties back into the overarching research question posed by this journal: what threshold of proof in criminal cases allows for the guilty to effectively be convicted while minimizing innocents in prison?
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Another major question is the value put on exonerating different types of cases. For example, while on an individual level major cases such as murder and rape carry more weight than lesser charges, and being convicted of these while innocent would also be worse, but, it is also important to consider the consequences of large numbers of false convictions of smaller crimes. A series of wrongful convictions of lesser crimes can lead to major social corrosion and anger throughout society about the criminal justice system. Therefore, it is important to also work towards alleviating wrongful conviction rates of more basic crimes. For my research, however, I plan to focus on more major crimes with harsher punishments as these convictions clearly have more effect on the life of an individual, which for me is what the justice system seeks to protect. This contrast of different types of crimes also makes me want to research whether wrongful convictions are more common in some crimes than others and what the reasoning for this is. I will look for patterns among wrongful convictions and the numbers of them that have been proven in order to possibly focus my research on a specific crime or at least group of crimes similar in either nature or severity. Additionally, Risinger mentions types of reform that can be targeted and establishes that reform is needed. So in my research I plan to explore different types of reforms for both exonerations and reduction of wrongful convictions.