Few problems can pose a greater threat to free, democratic societies than that of wrongful conviction—the conviction of an innocent person. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to this problem, perhaps because of our understandable concern with the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system in combatting crime. Drawing on our own database of nearly 500 cases of wrongful conviction, our survey of criminal justice officials, and our review of extant literature on the subject, we address three major questions: (1) How frequent is wrongful conviction? (2) What are its major causes? and (3) What policy implications may be derived from this study?

Legal literature from the beginning of the century, as well as more recent studies, furnish us with accounts of cases of innocent men and women who were tried and convicted of serious crimes throughout the United States. This study surveys the literature on those cases and describes these wrongful convictions by the distribution of offenses, of sentences, of actual punishment inflicted, and types of error contributing to the wrongful conviction.

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