Public Perception of Wrongful Conviction: Support for Compensation and Apologies
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT (1) With over 280 post-conviction DNA exonerations through Innocence Projects in the United States alone and half a dozen Commissions of Inquiry into wrongful convictions in Canada, the public may be more aware of wrongful convictions than ever before. Recent research, however, has documented the paucity of resources available post-conviction for individuals who have been wrongly convicted, the limited and financial focus of current compensation statutes, the many difficulties in obtaining compensation, and the desire of many individuals who have been wrongly convicted to receive an apology for the injustices they have suffered. To investigate public perception of compensation, face-to-face interviews were conducted with fifteen community members. Findings suggest that all interviewees believed that individuals who have been wrongly convicted should receive compensation and apologies. Many felt these individuals needed financial compensation in order to start over, and that they deserved compensation because of the time they had lost while wrongly incarcerated and the damage done to their reputations. Interviewees also felt that public apologies would positively impact the Criminal Justice System, as well as benefit the wider community. Interviewees also mentioned a number of nonfinancial forms of compensation they felt wrongly convicted individuals should receive, including employment training and assistance, housing assistance, and other services. Although most interviewees reported not knowing how much money individuals received in compensation, they felt the dollar amount should be related to particular factors, such as the length of time wrongly incarcerated, character damage, and the impact on their health. Although these findings appear positive, it is noteworthy that forty percent of the sample brought up issues of the judicially released guilty during the interviews, perhaps suggesting that they felt wrongful conviction was of equal (or lower) importance as the guilty who got away. I. INRODUCTION: PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF WRONGFUL CONVICTION: SUPPORT FOR COMPENSATION AND APOLOGIES As of January 10, 2012, the Innocence Project had exonerated 289 American citizens through post-conviction DNA testing. (2) Samuel Gross, Kristen Jacoby, Daniel Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, and Sujata Patel found 196 wrongful conviction cases in the United States from 1989 to 2003 where evidence other than DNA was used to declare a defendant not guilty of a crime for which he or she had been convicted. (3) In Canada, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted CAIDWYC) has played a role in the exoneration of eighteen Canadians. (4) Anthony Doob, however, surveyed defense counsel in the province of Ontario and found that nearly half of the sample (n=94; 46.3%) believed they had represented at least one client who was factually innocent but convicted to serve at least one year in prison. (5) Although the exact number of incarcerated innocents is unknown, (6) a conservative estimate of 0.5% of all convictions being wrongful convictions would translate into approximately 7,500 wrongful convictions in the United States in the year 2000 for index crimes alone (7) or roughly 1,000 innocent people incarcerated in the United Kingdom each year. (8) Innocence organizations exist internationally (e.g., Germany, Australia, Japan) (9) as there are thousands--if not tens of thousands--of individuals who have been wrongly convicted worldwide. Saundra Westervelt and Kimberly Cook argued that victims of wrongful conviction are often re-victimized post exoneration because the government fails to provide them with meaningful assistance (e.g., employment, housing, etc.). (10) In fact, many individuals who have been wrongly convicted do not receive anything from the government upon their release; particularly given that some do not even qualify for assistance provided to those rightly convicted and released on parole. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it