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Regulating Unreliable Evidence: Can Evidence Rules Guide Juries And Prevent Wrongful Convictions, Lisa Dufraimont

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Recent years have seen increasing concern over the prevalence of wrongful convictions in Canadian criminal courts. This concern is particularly pronounced in jury trials, as jurors are untrained and often lack the familiarity, experience and knowledge required to evaluate evidence of doubtful reliability. Research has suggested that three forms of evidence - eyewitness identification, confessions and jailhouse-informant testimony -pose particular reliability concerns in jury trials. The special problem, common to all three, is the tendency of jurors to overlook the factors that make them unreliable. Canadian criminal evidence law purports to address this problem, but the author argues that the …