Who Could it be Now? Challenging the Reliability of First Time In-Court Identifications After State v. Henderson and State v. Lawson

Despite the recent advances in assessing the reliability of eyewitness identifications, the focus to date has largely been identifications made pretrial. Little has been written about identifications made for the first time in the courtroom. While in-court identifications have an extraordinarily powerful effect on juries, all such identifications are potentially vulnerable to post-event memory distortion and decay. Absent an identification procedure that effectively tests the witness’s memory, it is impossible to know if the witness’s identification of the defendant is a product of his or her original memory or a product of the extraordinarily suggestive circumstances created by the in-court identification procedure. In this article, the authors discuss the science related to memory and perception and how the courts have historically addressed claims of suggestiveness in the context of eyewitness identifications and, specifically, how they have handled first time in-court identifications. They analyze the issue of first time, in-court identifications under the new legal frameworks established by the Oregon Supreme Court in State v. Lawson (2012) and the New Jersey Supreme Court in State v. Henderson (2011), which both recognize 30 years of science proving that memories are malleable and easily influenced by outside forces. They argue that, in all states, first time, in-court identifications should be inadmissible, forcing the state to conduct a reliable out-of-court identification, whether pretrial or with leave during trial

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2015 Innocence Network Conference, Orlando, Florida

The Innocence Network is “an affiliation of organizations from all over the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions.” Beginning in 1999 and 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, a small group of interested legal and social science scholars and clinic directors met at the Northwestern University School of Law to discuss ways to investigate and litigate claims of actual innocence. The first recognized National Innocence Conference took place at the California Western School of Law in 2002, and included 130 registered attendees. The Innocence Network, building upon the successful 2002 conference, formally established an advisory Board of Directors in 2005. An annual Innocence Network conference has been held each year since 2002, with the May 2015 conference in Orlando, Florida, generating more than 500 attendees, including 150 exonerees

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2015 Innocence Network Conference, Orlando, Florida

The Innocence Network is “an affiliation of organizations from all over the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions.” Beginning in 1999 and 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, a small group of interested legal and social science scholars and clinic directors met at the Northwestern University School of Law to discuss ways to investigate and litigate claims of actual innocence. The first recognized National Innocence Conference took place at the California Western School of Law in 2002, and included 130 registered attendees. The Innocence Network, building upon the successful 2002 conference, formally established an advisory Board of Directors in 2005. An annual Innocence Network conference has been held each year since 2002, with the May 2015 conference in Orlando, Florida, generating more than 500 attendees, including 150 exonerees

Overturning Apodaca v. Oregon Should Be Easy: Nonunanimous Jury Verdicts in Criminal Cases Undermine the Credibility of Our Justice System

52 pages.In 1934, Oregon amended its Constitution to allow, “that in the circuit court ten members of the jury may render a verdict of guilty or not guilty, save and except a verdict of guilty for first degree murder, which shall be found only by unanimous verdict.” Oregon became the second state, after Louisiana, to allow nonunanimous juries in criminal cases. Louisiana’s “Majority Rule,” passed in 1880, three years after Reconstruction when white landowners sought to replace black slave labor. The new law allowed juries to convict defendants without a unanimous vote and was deliberately designed to create more convicts to increase the labor force. Making convictions easier meant more prisoners, especially freed blacks, and more prisoners meant more labor to lease for profit. Passed some fifty-four years later and under different circumstances, Oregon’s history is also shameful

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2015 Innocence Network Conference, Orlando, Florida

The Innocence Network is “an affiliation of organizations from all over the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions.” Beginning in 1999 and 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, a small group of interested legal and social science scholars and clinic directors met at the Northwestern University School of Law to discuss ways to investigate and litigate claims of actual innocence. The first recognized National Innocence Conference took place at the California Western School of Law in 2002, and included 130 registered attendees. The Innocence Network, building upon the successful 2002 conference, formally established an advisory Board of Directors in 2005. An annual Innocence Network conference has been held each year since 2002, with the May 2015 conference in Orlando, Florida, generating more than 500 attendees, including 150 exonerees

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2016 Innocence Network Conference, San Antonio, Texas

An introduction is presented that discusses various articles in the journal on the concept of wrongful conviction that were featured at the Innocence Network Conference in San Antonio, Texas, in April 2016

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2016 Innocence Network Conference, San Antonio, Texas

Innocent people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit throughout history. The exact number of wrongful convictions is unknowable. In 2014, however, the National Academy of Sciences (“NAS”) released a study of the cases of criminal defendants who were convicted and sentenced to death and concluded that 4.1% were wrongfully convicted. The researchers explained that “this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.” According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,561,500 adults were incarcerated in federal prisons, state prisons, and county jails in 2014, with an additional 4,708,100 adults under community supervision programs such as probation and parole. If we apply the NAS conservative estimate to just those who are incarcerated, there are more than 90,000 people wrongfully convicted and imprisoned in the United States