Week 1 - Introduction to the Unit Flashcards
What are the group of lawyers and volunteers to seek to prove wrongful convictions innocent?
The innocence project
How many exonerations have the innocence project made?
367
What are the exonerated cases of the innocence projects mostly based on?
DNA evidence
What percentage of perpetrators have been caught by the innocence project?
Around 50% of cases
What percentage of exonerations were black or hispanic with the innocence project?
Approx. 70%
What was the average time spent in prison for those exonerated by the innocence project?
Average of 14 years
How many people were released from death row by the innocence project?
21
What becomes apparent when looking at the innocence project?
Innocent people are being sent to jail and bad guys are not being caught.
What’s an issue with waiting a lengthy amount of time before realising there has been a wrongful conviction?
Most of the time it leaves it too late to catch the bad guys.
When you read literature about the innocent project, we often talk about BIG numbers. What do we need to bear in mind?
Big numbers don’t tell the whole story. Each one is an individual who lost a proportion of their life due to a miscarriage of justice. Huge social issue.
Is DNA a safe guard?
Not really.
Why is DNA not a safeguard? “objective science vs. interpretative art”. (5)
- nature of cases (DNA not available for most cases)
- doesn’t tell us as much as we think
- comparing a bunch of samples to a number of suspects (false positives)
- degraded, contaminated evidence
- accepted more often by jurors
Why do DNA errors, what are the key contributing factors?
- Eyewitness misidentification
- false admissions/confessions
- problems with forensic science
- poor legal representation
What percentage of cases use eyewitness identification’s roughly?
65-70% of exonerations have been due to this
Why are false identifications so problematic?
They are very persuasive evidence
What are some problems with scientific techniques in imprisonment? (4)
- Validity issues
- problems communicating and interpreting evidence
- poor/unethical conduct (rare)
- genuine error/cognitive biases (maybe less rare)
What is problems communicating and interpreting evidence often called?
white coat syndrome (deafness to authority), accept evidence in good faith.
What are some factors in poor legal representation which contribute to false imprisonment? (4)
- failed to contact experts for opinion
- failed to investigate alibi
- did not attend hearings
- falling asleep in court
Describe the case of Jimmy Ray Bromgard (6)
- convicted of rape
- sentenced to 40 years
- exonerated 14 and a half years later
- evidence of matching hair (testified that there was less than 1/10,000 chance this was not his, completely false claim)
- eyewitness ID (but victim not sure)
- terrible defence counsel (didn’t file any appeals, etc)
Ultimately, what do cases boil down to?
human decision making, memory, human error
Why study psychology and law? (2)
- to understand causes of wrongful imprisonment
- to improve procedures in the legal system
This course is NOT:
- clinically focused
2. legally focused
This course is:
focused on scientific psychological research.
