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False Confessions: Causes, Consequences And Implications, Richard A. Leo
False Confessions: Causes, Consequences And Implications, Richard A. Leo
Richard A. Leo
In the last two decades, hundred of convicted prisoners have been exonerated by DNA and non-DNA evidence, revealing that police-induced false confessions are a leading cause of the wrongful conviction of the innocent. This article reviews the empirical research on the causes and correlates of false confessions. After looking at the three sequential processes that are responsible for the elicitation of false confessions - misclassification, coercion and contamination - this article reviews the three psychologically distinct types of false confession (voluntary, compliant and persuaded) and then discusses the consequences of introducing false confession evidence in the criminal justice system. The …
Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science, Richard A. Leo, Jon B. Gould
Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science, Richard A. Leo, Jon B. Gould
Richard A. Leo
There has been an explosion of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions in the last decade, reflecting a growing concern about the problem of actual innocence in the criminal justice system. Yet criminal law and procedure scholars have engaged in relatively little dialogue or collaboration on this topic with criminologists. In this article, we use the empirical study of wrongful convictions to illustrate what criminological approaches—or, more broadly, social science methods—can teach legal scholars. After briefly examining the history of wrongful conviction scholarship, we discuss the limits of the (primarily) narrative methodology of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions. We argue that …