Wrongful Adviction In The Criminal Justice System

When reviewing the issues associated with the criminal justice system in the United States, wrongful convictions are becoming a serious one that society as a whole needs to be aware of. While there are a countless factors that can contribute to a wrongful conviction, there are five distinct ones that are the leading causes in wrongful convictions: the adversarial process, Eyewitness identification, misconduct and errors regarding forensic evidence, interrogations and confessions, and jailhouse snitches/informants.

In relation to wrongful convictions, the adversarial system places more emphasis on the process rather than truth finding, meaning an individual can usually only appeal if there is an issue regarding the process; if someone is wrongfully

The first one, the adversarial process, contains issues within both the prosecution and defense sides that lead to wrongful convictions. Prosecutors can be neglectful throughout the entire legal proceedings, which includes withholding evidence and pursuing a conviction despite evidence stating the contrary. Since they have all the information regarding the case, they are responsible for informing the defense counsel of the facts and evidence at hand. However, the prosecution can be neglectful, and disregard facts or information as irrelevant, or wrong, and ultimately not share it with the defense, despite that evidence being useful for the defense to know. This is the belief of perseverance bias, which is to continue to believe a theory despite disproving information (Burke, 2006). Prosecutors are more likely to adhere to the belief that a perpetrator is guilty, since it is their job to prove such, and when presented with evidence to suggest otherwise, they are likely to find it false, or irrelevant, and therefore, not pass the evidence along to the defense counsel. By not passing this evidence along, they weaken the defense’s ability to defend their client, and skew the case so that it already assumes

This factor is significant for increasing wrongful convictions because of issues regarding those who present the evidence. Jurors are more likely to view experts with more experience in the field as more credible than those with less experience. However, research reveals that experts with more experience were no better than novice experts in testing DNA evidence (Thompson, Tangen, & McCarthy, 2013). Furthermore, when presented with contextual bias, expert witnesses were more likely to reach a conclusion in their research that was consistent with the context given (Tompson et al., 2013). This means that despite jurors weighing forensic evidence heavily, these experts are likely to make mistakes within their research that could result in improper