Marvin Zalman
Professor Of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University
Key Findings
- Some issues not addressed by the innocence paradigm need to be considered to better understand and deal with wrongful convictions.
- Police investigation should be incorporated into the correlates of wrongful conviction that should be considered by innocence advocates and scholars.
- Reasons for investigative failures that may lead to wrongful convictions include issues of funding, workloads, professional status, accountability structures and cultures of police investigators and their departments.
- The risk of leaving the innocence paradigm as is, and not considering other issues, is a stagnation that retards needed action to improve justice processes that generate inaccurate verdicts.
Description
Expanding Wrongful Analysis to Include Police Investigation,” Zalman and Larson explore the correlates and causes of wrongful convictions, advocate that the correlates include the entirety of the police investigation and discuss how causation is and should be addressed in innocence advocacy and scholarship. The authors note that there are many reasons for investigative failures that may lead to wrongful convictions, including issues of funding, workloads, professional status, accountability structures and cultures of police investigators and their departments. Rather than building on existing studies that seek to improve verdict accuracy by correcting specific criminal justice and legal process errors, Zalman and Larson seek to view the entirety of police investigation as a potential course of wrongful convictions by focusing on whether investigators may fail to discover that the crime was committed by a serial criminal and not the suspect, who does not fit the serial criminal profile. The authors analyze a batch of wrongful conviction cases that originated with serial offenders’ crimes and conclude that innocence activists and scholars focus on crime investigation in its entirety, and not just its parts, and conclude that the risk of leaving the innocence paradigm as is, and not considering other issues, is a stagnation that retards needed action to improve justice processes that generate inaccurate verdicts.