Eighty Proposals To Stop Wrongful Convictions Before The End Of This Decade

This book is about the need to drastically reduce to .1% or less the frequency of wrongful conviction and to exonerate the thousands of wrongly convicted inmates now in prison. The United States has a large wrongful conviction problem, and it's a travesty. This book presents 80 Proposals to STOP the problem. The forensic DNA revolution, which produced its first wrongful conviction exoneration in 1989, has led to some changes in the U.S. criminal justice system but not nearly enough. In the history of criminal justice systems, the people wrongly convicted over the centuries always knew what had happened to them, but few others knew or cared. Now we all know. The book provides 80 practical proposals for national reform of the criminal justice system in order to reduce the frequency of wrongful conviction to .1 percent or less.

Imagine being convicted of a crime you didn't commit and spending years behind bars. Since 1989 more than 1,400 Americans who experienced this injustice have been exonerated. Some of the people who have won their freedom include Ronald Cotton, who was falsely convicted of raping a college student; Nicole Harris, who was unjustly imprisoned for the death of her son; and intellectually disabled Earl Washington Jr., who was unfairly sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young mother. Wrongful convictions shatter lives and harm society by allowing real perpetrators to potentially commit additional crimes. How can such injustices happen? Overturning Wrongful Convictions recounts stories of individuals who served someone else's prison time due to mistaken eyewitness identification, police misconduct, faulty forensic science, poor legal representation, courtroom mistakes, and other factors. You'll learn about the legal processes that can lead to unjust convictions and about the Innocence Project and other organizations dedicated to righting these wrongs. The sciences—including psychology, criminology, police science, and forensic science—work hand in hand with the legal system to prosecute and punish those people whose actions break laws. Those same sciences can also be used to free people who have been wrongfully convicted. As a society, can we learn from past mistakes to avoid more unjust convictions?

This "Little Green Book" presents 21 proposals for reducing the size of the human population to 1 billion people, in order to enable humanity to live sustainably on Earth. For centuries and millennia, humans have exploited the inherited riches of the Earth without significant observable permanent harm. The Industrial Revolution, which used non-human, non-animal power sources to accomplish tasks, began in the 18th century in Europe and North America. In the early 19th century, that power increasingly came from the burning of fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, and that burning created carbon dioxide. The ills of fossil fuel burning were compounded by population growth. Around the beginning of the 19th century, medical and nutritional advances led to the reduction of the death rate and populations began to grow more rapidly. This change can be said to be the beginning of the Demographic Transition, which is defined as the period during which there is a large gap between the declining death rate and the subsequent reduction of the birth rate which typically occurs several generations later. Proposed here are additional stages of the model to show a Sustainable Demographic Transition (SDT) to a human population of 1 billion, which was the population of the Earth around 1800. The question posed in this book is whether the human birth rate can be reduced soon enough to avoid much of the potential further damage to the Earth, and reduced further to enable remediation of previous damage. The year 1800 is chosen in this book as the pivotal year for the Industrial Revolution and Demographic Transition. At that time, the carbon dioxide density in the atmosphere was approximately 300 parts per million. During the subsequent 215 years, the Industrial Revolution accelerated and, together with exponential population growth, has degraded the ability of the Earth to sustain life. Whatever damage to the Earth the Industrial Revolution would have produced for a planet supporting one billion humans, that damage has been multiplied, so far, by the growth of the human population since 1800 to 7.3 billion by mid-2015. If not stopped, the multiplier will continue to grow. Even at the current and seemingly slow annual growth rate of 1.2%, the Earth's population will double to 14.6 billion in 58 years. Such a total is inconceivable, and avoidable. There has been debate about whether the sheer number of people is the problem or whether their unequal or excessive consumption patterns are the problem. The problem with that debate is that it poses a false choice, which need not be resolved here. That is, while there is no question that there is substantial inequality among people of income and wealth and therefore, of Earth-degrading consumption, there is also no question that every human being has an impact on the Earth. Putting it simply, more humans produce more carbon. Further, more humans have produced too many more humans. There are two basic elements of each human's impact on the Earth. First s/he consumes energy and resources, and s/he has the capacity to have children. Whatever the world's consumption patterns, there will be less consumption and Earth degradation when there are fewer people. This truth is a corollary to the message of population stabilization advocates since the 1970s - "Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause until we control population growth." The first of the 21 proposals is that all humans be encouraged to have no children, or at most, one child. The alternative to achieving population reduction through voluntary means is to endure catastrophes and collapse and gross reduction of biodiversity.

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

The text includes both classic pieces and original essays that provide the reader with a comprehensive, even-handed sense of the theoretical underpinnings, methodological challenges, and existing research necessary to understand the problems associated with racial and ethnic profiling and police bias.

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Scores of talented and dedicated people serve the forensic science community, performing vitally important work. However, they are often constrained by lack of adequate resources, sound policies, and national support. It is clear that change and advancements, both systematic and scientific, are needed in a number of forensic science disciplines to ensure the reliability of work, establish enforceable standards, and promote best practices with consistent application. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward provides a detailed plan for addressing these needs and suggests the creation of a new government entity, the National Institute of Forensic Science, to establish and enforce standards within the forensic science community. The benefits of improving and regulating the forensic science disciplines are clear: assisting law enforcement officials, enhancing homeland security, and reducing the risk of wrongful conviction and exoneration. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States gives a full account of what is needed to advance the forensic science disciplines, including upgrading of systems and organizational structures, better training, widespread adoption of uniform and enforceable best practices, and mandatory certification and accreditation programs. While this book provides an essential call-to-action for congress and policy makers, it also serves as a vital tool for law enforcement agencies, criminal prosecutors and attorneys, and forensic science educators.

2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Winner, Silver (Political and Social Sciences) Winner of the Montaigne Medal, awarded to "the most thought-provoking books" The first book to explore a shocking yet all-too-common type of wrongful conviction—one that locks away innocent people for crimes that never actually happened. Rodricus Crawford was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder by suffocation of his beautiful baby boy. After years on death row, evidence confirmed what Crawford had claimed all along: he was innocent, and his son had died from an undiagnosed illness. Crawford is not alone. A full one-third of all known exonerations stem from no-crime wrongful convictions. The first book to explore this common but previously undocumented type of wrongful conviction, Smoke but No Fire tells the heartbreaking stories of innocent people convicted of crimes that simply never happened. A suicide is mislabeled a homicide. An accidental fire is mislabeled an arson. Corrupt police plant drugs on an innocent suspect. A false allegation of assault is invented to resolve a custody dispute. With this book, former New York City public defender Jessica S. Henry sheds essential light on a deeply flawed criminal justice system that allows—even encourages—these convictions to regularly occur. Smoke but No Fire promises to be eye-opening reading for legal professionals, students, activists, and the general public alike as it grapples with the chilling reality that far too many innocent people spend real years behind bars for fictional crimes.

This open access book provides a comparative perspective on capital punishment in Japan and the United States. Alongside the US, Japan is one of only a few developed democracies in the world which retains capital punishment and continues to carry out executions on a regular basis. There are some similarities between the two systems of capital punishment but there are also many striking differences. These include differences in capital jurisprudence, execution method, the nature and extent of secrecy surrounding death penalty deliberations and executions, institutional capacities to prevent and discover wrongful convictions, orientations to lay participation and to victim participation, and orientations to “democracy” and governance. Johnson also explores several fundamental issues about the ultimate criminal penalty, such as the proper role of citizen preferences in governing a system of punishment and the relevance of the feelings of victims and survivors.