Reckless-Dinitz Memorial Lecture with Dr. Samuel Gross

April 17, 2015

3:30PM - 6:00PM

The Barrister Club, 25 W. 11th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43201

Add to Calendar 2015-04-17 15:30:00 2015-04-17 18:00:00 Reckless-Dinitz Memorial Lecture with Dr. Samuel Gross Note: Paid parking will be available at the Gateway Garage across the street from the Barrister Club. Abstract What we Think, What we Know, and What we Think we Know about False Criminal Convictions One of the inherent traits of false convictions also makes them maddeningly hard to study: We never notice them when they happen – if we did, they wouldn’t happen – and we only rarely detect them later on. Since we only know about the few, unrepresentative cases in which innocent defendants are identified and exonerated, it’s easy to hold untested, conventional views. For a long time common knowledge had it that false convictions were a vanishingly rare product of a criminal justice system that leans over backwards to avoid convicting the innocent. That view did not survive the huge increase in known exonerations in the United States in the past 25 years, more than 1,550 since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, and counting. Still, we have no reliable estimate of the rate of false conviction – except in the atypical but important context of death sentences. Our understanding of the causes of false convictions reflects the cases we know about. For example, the DNA exonerations in the 1990s and 2000s focused attention on eyewitness identification as the leading cause of wrongful conviction. That follows from the nature of DNA exonerations: in most, the underlying crime is sexual assault by a stranger, a category for which proof of guilt usually depends on eyewitness identification. By contrast, most exonerations we learned about in the past 12 years are homicide cases, for which the most likely causes of error appear to be perjury and official misconduct. But, inevitably, the false convictions we don’t know about are overwhelmingly for lower level crimes, misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. New data suggest most convictions of innocent defendants in this broad stratum are caused by the two central operational components of criminal adjudication in the United States, plea bargaining and pre-trial detention. LecturerSamuel R. Gross, the Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan, graduated from Columbia College in 1968 and earned a JD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He was a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco for several years, and worked as an attorney with the United Farm Workers Union in California and the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Committee in Nebraska and South Dakota. As a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York and the National Jury Project in Oakland, California, he litigated a series of test cases on jury selection in capital trials and worked on the issue of racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty. He was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and came to the University of Michigan from the Stanford Law School faculty.Prof. Gross teaches evidence, criminal procedure, and courses on wrongful criminal convictions. His published work includes articles and books on evidence law, the death penalty, false convictions, racial profiling, eyewitness identification, and the relationship between pretrial bargaining and trial verdicts.Prof. Gross is the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, exonerationregistry.org, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which maintains a detailed online database of all known exonerations in the United States since 1989.The National Registry of Exonerations was launched in May 2012, together with a detailed report by Prof. Gross: "Exonerations in the United States, 1989–2012, Report by the National Registry of Exonerations [pdf]."[pdf] - Some links on this page are to Adobe .pdf files requiring Adobe Reader. If you need them in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu The Barrister Club, 25 W. 11th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43201 OSU ASC Drupal 8 ascwebservices@osu.edu America/New_York public

Add to Calendar 2015-04-17 15:30:00 2015-04-17 18:00:00 Reckless-Dinitz Memorial Lecture with Dr. Samuel Gross Note: Paid parking will be available at the Gateway Garage across the street from the Barrister Club. Abstract What we Think, What we Know, and What we Think we Know about False Criminal Convictions One of the inherent traits of false convictions also makes them maddeningly hard to study: We never notice them when they happen – if we did, they wouldn’t happen – and we only rarely detect them later on. Since we only know about the few, unrepresentative cases in which innocent defendants are identified and exonerated, it’s easy to hold untested, conventional views. For a long time common knowledge had it that false convictions were a vanishingly rare product of a criminal justice system that leans over backwards to avoid convicting the innocent. That view did not survive the huge increase in known exonerations in the United States in the past 25 years, more than 1,550 since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, and counting. Still, we have no reliable estimate of the rate of false conviction – except in the atypical but important context of death sentences.   Our understanding of the causes of false convictions reflects the cases we know about. For example, the DNA exonerations in the 1990s and 2000s focused attention on eyewitness identification as the leading cause of wrongful conviction. That follows from the nature of DNA exonerations: in most, the underlying crime is sexual assault by a stranger, a category for which proof of guilt usually depends on eyewitness identification. By contrast, most exonerations we learned about in the past 12 years are homicide cases, for which the most likely causes of error appear to be perjury and official misconduct. But, inevitably, the false convictions we don’t know about are overwhelmingly for lower level crimes, misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. New data suggest most convictions of innocent defendants in this broad stratum are caused by the two central operational components of criminal adjudication in the United States, plea bargaining and pre-trial detention. LecturerSamuel R. Gross, the Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan, graduated from Columbia College in 1968 and earned a JD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He was a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco for several years, and worked as an attorney with the United Farm Workers Union in California and the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Committee in Nebraska and South Dakota. As a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York and the National Jury Project in Oakland, California, he litigated a series of test cases on jury selection in capital trials and worked on the issue of racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty. He was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and came to the University of Michigan from the Stanford Law School faculty.Prof. Gross teaches evidence, criminal procedure, and courses on wrongful criminal convictions. His published work includes articles and books on evidence law, the death penalty, false convictions, racial profiling, eyewitness identification, and the relationship between pretrial bargaining and trial verdicts.Prof. Gross is the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, exonerationregistry.org, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which maintains a detailed online database of all known exonerations in the United States since 1989.The National Registry of Exonerations was launched in May 2012, together with a detailed report by Prof. Gross: "Exonerations in the United States, 1989–2012, Report by the National Registry of Exonerations [pdf]."[pdf] - Some links on this page are to Adobe .pdf files requiring Adobe Reader. If you need them in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu The Barrister Club, 25 W. 11th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43201 Criminal Justice Research Center cjrc@osu.edu America/New_York public

Note: Paid parking will be available at the Gateway Garage across the street from the Barrister Club.

Abstract

What we Think, What we Know, and What we Think we Know about False Criminal Convictions

One of the inherent traits of false convictions also makes them maddeningly hard to study: We never notice them when they happen – if we did, they wouldn’t happen – and we only rarely detect them later on. Since we only know about the few, unrepresentative cases in which innocent defendants are identified and exonerated, it’s easy to hold untested, conventional views. For a long time common knowledge had it that false convictions were a vanishingly rare product of a criminal justice system that leans over backwards to avoid convicting the innocent. That view did not survive the huge increase in known exonerations in the United States in the past 25 years, more than 1,550 since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, and counting. Still, we have no reliable estimate of the rate of false conviction – except in the atypical but important context of death sentences.

Our understanding of the causes of false convictions reflects the cases we know about. For example, the DNA exonerations in the 1990s and 2000s focused attention on eyewitness identification as the leading cause of wrongful conviction. That follows from the nature of DNA exonerations: in most, the underlying crime is sexual assault by a stranger, a category for which proof of guilt usually depends on eyewitness identification. By contrast, most exonerations we learned about in the past 12 years are homicide cases, for which the most likely causes of error appear to be perjury and official misconduct. But, inevitably, the false convictions we don’t know about are overwhelmingly for lower level crimes, misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. New data suggest most convictions of innocent defendants in this broad stratum are caused by the two central operational components of criminal adjudication in the United States, plea bargaining and pre-trial detention.

Lecturer

Samuel R. Gross, the Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan, graduated from Columbia College in 1968 and earned a JD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He was a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco for several years, and worked as an attorney with the United Farm Workers Union in California and the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Committee in Nebraska and South Dakota. As a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York and the National Jury Project in Oakland, California, he litigated a series of test cases on jury selection in capital trials and worked on the issue of racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty. He was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and came to the University of Michigan from the Stanford Law School faculty.

Prof. Gross teaches evidence, criminal procedure, and courses on wrongful criminal convictions. His published work includes articles and books on evidence law, the death penalty, false convictions, racial profiling, eyewitness identification, and the relationship between pretrial bargaining and trial verdicts.

Prof. Gross is the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, exonerationregistry.org, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which maintains a detailed online database of all known exonerations in the United States since 1989.

The National Registry of Exonerations was launched in May 2012, together with a detailed report by Prof. Gross: "Exonerations in the United States, 1989–2012, Report by the National Registry of Exonerations [pdf]."

[pdf] - Some links on this page are to Adobe .pdf files requiring Adobe Reader. If you need them in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu