Wrongful Conviction Essay
In every system there are flaws. The criminal justice system is no exception. A major flaw that occurs is the problem of wrongful convictions. Around the world, innocent people are incarcerated and sometimes even executed for crimes that they didn’t commit. The United States of America is known for its high number of overturned cases due to actual innocence. Japan has a reputation for its impossibly high conviction rate, but this reputation tends to overshadow its also high rate of wrongful convictions (Johnson, 2015).
Since the end of the 20th century, more than 1,400 inmates have been released from incarceration due to evidence found after their convictions that proved their innocence (Johnson, 2015). Of those 1,400 people, approximately
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In America, police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, the discovery of new evidence after-the-fact and the effects of plea bargaining all contribute to the high number of innocent people being convicted of a crime (“Innocence and Wrongful Convictions,” 2016). As an adversarial system, the American criminal justice system puts more importance on justice than truth, which can lead to the wrong person being convicted. Japan also has problems of police and prosecutorial misconduct. False confessions are the most frequent cause of all wrongful convictions in Japan. Between 1945 and 1991 eighty-four percent of the cases that were overturned were due to false confessions that were given because of police misconduct forcing a confession out of an alleged perpetrator. This percentage is very different from its counterpart in the American system. Between 1989 and 2014 false confessions only contributed to 13% of the 146 overturned cases (Johnson, 2015). In Japan, prosecutorial misconduct commonly occurs when prosecutor’s fail to disclose exculpatory evidence, this helps to explain Japan’s famously high conviction rate (“Innocence and Wrongful Convictions,” 2016). Japanese prosecutors are extremely cautious in charging cases, only charging ones they know they can win (Johnson,
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