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Measuring Wrongful Convictions

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Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Overview

Measuring wrongful convictions includes counting exonerations, estimating the incidence of wrongful convictions, and measuring the correlates of wrongful convictions in known exoneration cases. Measuring wrongful convictions is an important task because it can be used to evaluate the inaccuracy and unfairness of the criminal justice system.

A wrongful conviction is a conviction that is factually inaccurate, that is, the wrong person was convicted or a person was convicted for a crime that did not occur. An actual innocence exoneration is an official act that erases the legal status of guilt based on a judgment of factual innocence.

Wrongful convictions are inherently difficult to establish because they are “invisible” when they occur, the process of reconstructing equivocal evidence that led to a conviction in the first place is difficult, and prosecutors and courts are resistant to opening old convictions.

Lists of exonerations are not kept by government agencies but by...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, 3291 Faculty/Administration Bldg., Detroit, MI, 48202, USA

    Marvin Zalman

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  1. Marvin Zalman
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Correspondence to Marvin Zalman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  2. VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  3. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

  4. Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Weisburd

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Zalman, M. (2014). Measuring Wrongful Convictions. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_162

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_162

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5689-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5690-2

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