Unreliable Evidence and Wrongful Convictions: The Case for Excluding Tainted Identification Evidence and Jailhouse and Coerced Confessions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twenty years ago in his excellent treatise Charter Principles and Proof in Criminal Cases, David Paciocco carefully canvassed case for a constitutional right to have inherently unreliable evidence excluded under Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and American Bill of Rights. In end, Professor Paciocco concluded that no such right existed under American jurisprudence and that exclusion of unreliable evidence should not be considered a principle of fundamental justice under s. 7. Professor Paciocco was undoubtedly correct in his legal analysis in 1987 and his predictions that Canadian courts would not recognize a Charter right to exclusion of unreliable evidence proved correct.These conclusions were, however, penned before experience with wrongful convictions became well known. In calling for an ability of judges to direct verdict of acquittals in face of manifestly unreliable evidence, former Chief Justice Lamer has recently concluded that the recent spate of demonstrated convictions of innocent persons are proof that juries are not always reliable. It is no longer acceptable for criminal justice system to place blind faith in perceived innate good sense of juries. Similar conclusions could support a greater willingness to exclude evidence that is manifestly unreliable in light of experience of wrongful convictions. I will argue in this article that Supreme Court's continued unwillingness to exclude evidence because of concerns about its reliability should be reconsidered in light of experience of wrongful convictions. I will examine in particular case for excluding tainted identification evidence, jailhouse confession and coerced confessions, all forms of evidence that have played a role in past wrongful convictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".