Prosecutorial Involvement in Exoneration

Abstract

The current literature on wrongful convictions documents the legal, psychological, and institutional barriers that prosecutors face in considering post-conviction claims of innocence. However, less is known about how the local court context may relate to prosecutors’ decisions to engage in wrongful conviction investigations. To address this gap, the present study explores how characteristics of the local court community are related to the likelihood of prosecutors assisting, actively opposing, or remaining uninvolved in post-conviction claims of innocence. Specifically, we examine prosecutorial involvement in exonerations from three levels: case-factors, organizational factors, and county-context factors. Using archival data on the exonerations of factually innocent individuals (N = 75), we find that case-related factors are the strongest predictors of prosecutors’ involvement in exonerations. Broadly, our findings suggest that prosecutors are more willing to revisit, assist and even investigate potentially wrongful convictions when the stakes are lower (e.g. the offense is less severe, there is no alleged official misconduct, the district attorney is well-established in the role, etc.). Given the wide range of prosecutorial responses to wrongful conviction claims, we emphasize the importance of specialized conviction review units to help routinize the practice of post-conviction review. Secondly, we suggest that district attorneys explicitly define professional performance metrics to include corrective measures such as assisting in the review of wrongful conviction claims. Finally, we encourage states to adopt formal legal regulations to guide prosecutorial behavior in response to post-conviction claims of innocence.

Identifying and Charging True Perpetrators in Cases of Wrongful Convictions

“…In line with prior research (Weintraub, 2020), prosecutorial misconduct was found to be negatively associated with the odds of identifying a true perpetrator. As previously discussed, prosecutors historically do not cooperate with the majority of post-conviction innocence claims (Webster, 2019), especially in high-stakes cases such as those with prosecutorial misconduct (Bowman & Gould, 2020). Therefore, prosecutors may be more inclined to object to post-conviction petitions for DNA testing-the mechanism which would identify a true perpetrator in these DNA exoneration cases-if prosecutorial misconduct was present at trial.…”

“…Specifically, we include defining characteristics of wrongful convictions cases, such as contributors to wrongful convictions (e.g., eyewitness misidentification and prosecutorial misconduct), case demographics (e.g., the most severe crime type and high volume exoneration county), and the assistance of an innocence organization (e.g., Gould, Carrano, Leo, & Young, 2013;West & Meterko, 2016). We then include additional factors that are related to criminal justice outcomes more broadly, such as race (e.g., Eberhardt et al, 2006;Viglione, Hannon, & DeFina, 2011) and the advent of DNA technology (e.g., Bowman & Gould, 2020;Weintraub, 2020). We hypothesize that, given the overarching effect of these variables in the criminal justice system, they likely impact outcomes for true perpetrator identification as well.…”