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Emotionally Charged: The Prosecutorial Charging Decision And The Innocence Revolution, Daniel Medwed
Emotionally Charged: The Prosecutorial Charging Decision And The Innocence Revolution, Daniel Medwed
Daniel S. Medwed
Efforts to rectify wrongful convictions in the United States arguably represent a new civil rights movement for the twentieth-first century. Since 1989, post-conviction DNA testing has exonerated over two hundred inmates, their innocence proven beyond a shadow of a doubt through science, and at least three hundred other innocent prisoners have gained their freedom in cases lacking the magic bullet of DNA. Studies of these cases reveal that specific factors tend to cause wrongful convictions in the first place. Misbehavior by prosecutors - especially involving the suppression of exculpatory evidence - has emerged as one of those factors. This Symposium …