Wrongful Convictions In The Criminal Justice System

Wrongful convictions can happen, they should be looked at more by the system as more of a tragedy, but they do happen. In the criminal justice system there are so many different aspects and loop holes that effect the outlook on crime, let alone the convictions that happen. If we can look at all of the good that this system brings. All of the restitution paid, all of the criminals who committed a crime and have served what they deserve. I feel as if we can look so strongly at all of the good, we need to also look at the bad more intensely. The bad is what goes on the news. The bad is what makes cops, prosecutors, and judges look bad. On this task force, I want to review different aspects of our system that can be strongly correlated with wrongful
But, can have steady impacts on someone who did not commit a crime being accused. For instance, within our adversarial process, the role of bias plays a big part in how the case is run. Whether it be deeply ingrained biases growing up, or just a prejudice that came about from growing up it has immense repercussions on wrongful convictions. Next, is a huge factor that affects many wrongful convictions cases. That would be eyewitness identification. Eyewitness identification has some good factors but also many bad factors. For instance, we looked into many studies on how sequential lineups can reduce false identifications of innocent suspects by reducing eyewitnesses’ reliance on relative judgment processes (Lindsay & Wells, 1985, p. 556). But also how people struggle to recall a certain person they have maybe seen in another situation. Another topic that’s become a growing topic is forensic evidence misconduct/errors. Many aspects can go into the makings of forensic evidence misconduct/errors. Many researchers like to study the quality control and training. The growing concern is whether bias and beliefs can greatly affect the outcome of an expert interpreting information like finger
I would like to put more budget into finding a scientific way to reduce wrongful convictions from eyewitness testimony. My reasoning for this is because, so far we know about 70% of all wrongful convictions result from eyewitness testimony. This is understood, but, there are measures we can take to reduce the wrongful conviction. One issue that can we can use is to up our funding for the cognitive interview to gain better and more accurate information from witnesses. It has been proven to show a big increase in factual information with only a slight increase in incorrect information (Memon, Meissner, 2010). I would like to have a heavily trained state to interview most if not all witnesses this way to ensure that we can try to push that 70% into even 1% less. Also from Memon. A lot can be learned from this article to gain the information we need. He concludes that, twenty-five years of empirical research has shown the CI to be an effective method of interviewing witnesses (Memon, Meissner, 2010). What we can grasp from this is, even if there are improvements in this study. We can improve our system and state by including this in our training for