In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

History and Background Twenty years ago, the claim that innocent people had been wrongly convicted of serious crimes would have been “treated with general incredulity.” By 2001, however, a “Harris Poll found 94 percent of Americans believed that innocent defendants are sometimes executed .”1 How did we get to this point? Many observers point their fingers at DNA testing, saying the exonerations that came to light in the late 1990s made it impossible to deny that the criminal justice system makes mistakes. But this was hardly the first evidence of erroneous convictions ; that line of research goes back more than eighty years now and possibly much longer, depending on whom you believe. There sometimes is a tendency to see wrongful convictions as a legal issue. That is, the causes of wrongful convictions rest with officers and agents of a legal process; the existence of such errors represents the denial of important legal protections; and the response to mistaken convictions is legal reforms pressed by legal activists and adopted by lawmakers or jurists. Such a view, however, misses the broader, political context in which policy issues are identified, advanced, and resolved in America. Erroneous convictions have become a cause célèbre, not simply because there now is incontrovertible evidence of innocence, but also because changes in political and social life have raised the salience of the issue. In turn, a legal and political constituency arose to demand the resolution of this problem, and people from across the political spectrum—most notably, traditional conservatives—came to support reform. Nor can we ignore the issue’s connection to the death penalty, where the stakes of error are much higher than for other felonies. Indeed, the fact that many of the first erroneous convictions were found in capital cases propelled the issue ahead at a sometimes breakneck pace in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But no one should be fooled into believing that wrongful convictions exist only in capital matters; in fact, the 1 11 research by the Innocence Commission for Virginia suggests that the problems are just as great in other cases. Nonetheless, the heightened stakes of error in capital cases served to launch reform once DNA testing provided the kind of irrefutable evidence that mistakes had been made. Virginia provides a remarkable laboratory in which to observe the changing political and legal cultures that have made wrongful convictions a subject worthy not only of serious political consideration but also reform. A state that had rightfully earned its reputation as the cradle of the confederacy and whose criminal justice system was lambasted as one of the most needlessly severe in the country, Virginia has remade itself in the first decade of the new millennium as a leader in criminal justice reform. To be sure, Virginia’s transformation may reflect just how far it had to come—and as will be detailed in later chapters, the Commonwealth still has much further to go—but if meaningful reform can take place in Virginia, the same is certainly true elsewhere. Virginia ’s change also illustrates one of the central themes of this book: that the discovery and reform of problems in the criminal justice system do not happen by chance, nor do they occur by some rational, legalistic formula by which activists identify a problem, propose a reform, and advance their proposal to legal policymakers who adopt the measure. Wrongful convictions have been with us for decades, if not centuries. That the issue reached the national policy agenda and has engendered reform over the last decade is a reflection of political processes and social pressures at work on a legal issue. This is not to say that lawyers or legal processes are irrelevant to the resolution of problems in the criminal justice system. Rather, observers and activists for legal change must understand that the process is about much more than law. In this chapter, I outline the history of wrongful convictions and explain how the issue began its rise to the national policy agenda, especially in Virginia. Both the legal and political worlds found it convenient to downplay the probability of wrongful convictions until scientific evidence made it impossible to ignore them. As the rest of the book argues, though, it would be a tragedy if policymakers came to believe that the modest reforms adopted in the last few years have “solved” the problem of wrongful convictions. There are many forces behind these errors, and they are likely to...

Share