Wrongful Conviction

The book authored by Edwin Borchard titled Convicting the Innocent (1932) was the pioneer step in the regard of a systematic investigation for the miscarriages of justice in America. The book challenged the conventional thought which believed that America is free of any instance where in the innocent people were convicted as in this book the author showcased 65 cases with the innocent being first wrongfully prosecuted, then convicted and later imprisoned. The focus of the research by Bochard was more on the reason behind wrongful convictions and how it can be tackled rather than being that whether innocent individuals are the victims of wrongful convictions or not. According to the author, majority of such cases were due to the misidentification by the eyewitness, the misconduct of the policemen or the prosecutors and in some cases false confessions or perjured testimony. Thereafter a number of empirical investigations tried …show more content…
The use of DNA testing in resolving the inconsistencies in the post-conviction cases was particularly useful, as in these cases, the defendant was long requesting and claiming about his erroneous conviction. The technology was extremely useful for examining the biological evidence and proved extremely beneficial in capital cases by identifying the instances of wrongful convictions (Scheck et al., 2000). Then the study by Edward et al., during the year 1996 study became the pioneer study that could establish the use of DNA testing in finding conclusive evidence for an innocent being wrongfully convicted. This study particularly investigated cases of wrongful convictions by making use of the DNA testing and identified 28 cases where in the prisoner was innocent; in addition to this the study also ascertained that in around 18% cases, these convictions were victimized due to false