Towards an International Right to Claim Innocence

In the past, wrongful convictions were seen as a local problem largely undeserving of national or international attention. Very different legal systems have shared a common approach of emphasizing the finality of criminal convictions, thereby making it very difficult to claim innocence by relying on new evidence uncovered post-trial. While international law guarantees a right to a fair trial, a presumption of innocence, and a right to appeal, no international human rights norms clearly obligate countries to allow defendants to meaningfully assert post-trial claims of innocence. Today, the procedures and attitudes toward claims of innocence that rely on newly discovered evidence are in flux as more countries have adopted broader remedies for convicts to claim innocence

Judging Innocence

This empirical study examines for the first time how the criminal justice system in the United States handled the cases of people who were subsequently found innocent through postconviction DNA testing. The data collected tell the story of this unique group of exonerees, starting with their criminal trials, moving through levels of direct appeals and habeas corpus review, and ending with their eventual exonerations. Beginning with the trials of these exonerees, this study examines the leading types of evidence supporting their wrongful convictions, which were erroneous eyewitness identifications, forensic evidence, informant testimony, and false confessions. Yet our system of criminal appeals and postconviction review poorly addressed factual deficiencies in these trials. Few exonerees brought claims regarding those facts or claims alleging their innocence. For those who did, hardly any claims were granted by courts. Far from recognizing innocence, courts often denied relief by finding errors to be harmless. Criminal appeals and postconviction proceedings brought before these exonerees proved their innocence using DNA testing yielded apparently high numbers of reversals 14% reversal rate. However, that reversal rate was indistinguishable from the background reversal rates of comparable rape and murder convictions. Our system may produce high rates of reversible errors during rape and murder trials. Finally, even after DNA testing was available, many exonerees had difficulty securing access to testing and ultimately receiving relief. These findings all demonstrate how our criminal system failed to effectively review unreliable factual evidence, and as a result, misjudged innocence

Validating the Right to Counsel

This Essay, written as part of a Symposium celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, focuses on the elaboration of the Gideon right in the context of ineffective assistance of counsel litigation. First, I describe how ineffective assistance of counsel claims came to dominate and define federal habeas corpus litigation, changing the structure of state post-conviction rules in reaction to the new prominence of ineffective assistance of counsel claims at the federal level, expanding to consider assistance of counsel during plea bargaining, and raising complex questions for post-conviction courts. Despite the ubiquity of ineffective assistance of counsel claims, the constitutional test is shot through with a prejudice analysis, as well as with a set of strong substantive blinders: judgments that only certain types of failures by counsel will be regulated. Second, I ask whether the approach towards judging effectiveness of defense counsel could be “validated” by social science evidence, or at least be better informed by it. The bar has increasingly engaged with science and social science to provide improved standards for effective defense representation. In turn, social scientists might more closely study the effectiveness of defense lawyering across stages of the criminal process. Over time, this work may help to validate the right to counsel

The Myth of the Presumption of Innocence

James Q. Whitman, in his deeply comparative new article, describes the American criminal justice system, in contrast with continental and inquisitorial systems, as more focused on the danger of innocent persons being arrested and convicted. In this Response, I respond by questioning the comparison on both sides of the equation, not to disagree with its utility or its contours, but because I admire the project and seek to elaborate here on Whitman’s deep concern with unpacking the status of the presumption of innocence and that of mercy. I describe how the American presumption of innocence is more of an ideal than real. Nor does the supposed and oft proclaimed focus in constitutional criminal procedure on the question of guilt or innocence translate into rights protective as against wrongful convictions. However, there is today the potential for a new kind of convergence, as systems on both sides of the Atlantic are responding to wrongful convictions with a rethinking of traditional procedural rules, including rules of finality that long resisted reopening convictions in a broad range of civil and common law systems. Continental systems are increasingly receptive to claims of new evidence of innocence, in part because of lessons drawn from research on wrongful convictions in the United States. And in a reverse irony, inquisitorial tools are influencing efforts to make criminal adjudication in the United States more reliable. As a result, in the years ahead, there is much that all systems can do to make the presumption of innocence far more than the vestigial “inaccurate, shorthand description” of a right that it has so often served as in the past, and instead a “corner stone” of criminal justice

DNA and Due Process

The U.S. Supreme Court in District Attorney\u27s Office v. Osborne confronted novel and complex constitutional questions regarding the postconviction protections offered to potentially innocent convicts. Two decades after DNA testing exonerated the first inmate in the United States, the Court heard its first claim by a convict seeking DNA testing that could prove innocence. I argue that, contrary to early accounts, the Court did not reject a constitutional right to postconviction DNA testing. Despite language suggesting the Court would not constitutionalize the issue by announcing an unqualified freestanding right, Chief Justice Roberts\u27s majority opinion proceeded to carefully fashion an important, but qualified and derivative procedural due process right. While denying relief to Osborne for narrow factual and procedural reasons, the Court\u27s ruling swept more broadly. The Court held that states with postconviction discovery rules, as almost all have enacted, may not arbitrarily deny access to postconviction DNA testing, and then pointed to the generous provisions of the federal Innocence Protection Act as a model for an adequate statute. The Court also continued to assume that litigants may assert constitutional claims of actual innocence in habeas proceedings. In this Essay, I explore the contours of the Osborne due process right, its larger implications for constitutional interpretation, and, more specifically, whether the decision has the potential to create pressure on the States to provide meaningful avenues for convicts to litigate their innocence

Introduction: Symposium on ‘Convicting the Innocent

Examining what went wrong in the first 250 DNA exonerations was a sobering occupation, and I describe what I found in my book Convicting the Innocent, published by Harvard University Press in 2011. Still more haunting is the question of how many other wrongful convictions have not been uncovered and will never see the light of day. The New England Law Review has brought together a remarkable group of scholars who have each made leading contributions to the study of wrongful convictions from different disciplines and scholarly perspectives: Simon Cole, Deborah Davis, Gisli H. Gudjonsson, Richard Leo, and Elizabeth Loftus. Each has done ground-breaking work focusing on evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions, looking beyond just what we know from the wrongful convictions that do come to light. This Symposium issue returns the focus to research that can tell us more about the causes of wrongful convictions, and in this introduction I try to do justice to their remarkable contributions

The Metamorphosis of Corporate Criminal Prosecutions

Corporate criminal enforcement has exploded in this country. Billion dollar fines are now routine across a range of industries, where they were unimaginable a decade ago. We have federal prosecutors and the Department of Justice, together with the white-collar bar, to thank for this. Their innovations have transformed what was, in decades past, a backwater area of criminal practice. Yet deep concerns remain that corporate prosecution settlements offer lenient and non-transparent deals that fail to hold either the corporations or the culpable individuals adequately accountable. Now, the DOJ has begun to rethink the evolving corporate prosecution approach through the adoption of new guidelines. This Essay explores the most recent set of changes to the evolving DOJ approach, responding to an incisive critique offered by Professors Elizabeth Joh and Thomas Joo. While a commendable and overdue effort, I agree with Joh and Joo that the changes are incremental and may have perverse consequences. Still more troubling, the changes entirely fail to address separate concerns, including regarding calculation of fines, scope and effectiveness of compliance reforms, treatment of recidivists, and supervision of agreements. A deeper rethinking of the federal approach towards enforcing corporate crime is much needed. During a time of broader rethinking of our criminal justice priorities, the paramount concern with leniency and rehabilitation in corporate prosecutions should instead be directed to the benefit of individuals

Innocence, Harmless Error, and Federal Wrongful Conviction Law

This Article examines the body of law emerging in cases brought by former criminal defendants once exonerated, often through DNA testing, which may fundamentally reshape our criminal justice system. Federal wrongful conviction actions share a novel construction - they rely on criminal procedure rights incorporated as an element in a civil rights lawsuit. During a criminal trial, remedies for violations of procedural rights are often seen as truth defeating, because they exclude evidence possibly probative of guilt. In a civil wrongful conviction action, that remedial paradigm is reversed. The exonerated defendant instead seeks to remedy government misconduct that was truth defeating and concealed evidence of innocence. This Article contends that in a civil case, the harmless error rules that limit remedies for violations of criminal procedure rights do not apply. Further, though not generally recognized as such, the Supreme Court has created internal harmless error rules to accompany each of the relevant fair trial claims: the Brady v. Maryland right to have exculpatory evidence disclosed; the right to effective assistance of counsel; the right to be free from suggestive eyewitness identification procedures; and the right not to be subject to a coerced confession. Civil claims suggest the transformative result that for each right, harmless error insulation is stripped away. This Article concludes by reflecting on how wrongful conviction suits may spearhead wide-ranging reform of our criminal justice system and renew substantive development of the constitutional right to a fair trial