The Challenges of Preventing the Common Immediate Causes of Wrongful Convictions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines four common immediate causes of wrongful convictions as confirmed by recent data from registries. They are mistaken eyewitness identification, incentivized and lying witnesses, false confessions and faulty forensics. Commonly used remedies designed to prevent these immediate causes are examined from a legal process perspective, which stresses the different remedies that can be implemented by courts, legislatures and through executive measures. The latter includes reforms that police and forensic science providers can take themselves to decrease the risk of causing wrongful convictions. The most effective strategies often involve all three branches of government. At the same time, many jurisdictions are reluctant to adopt optimal reform measures because of concerns about preventing the use of evidence that is frequently used to achieve convictions. For example, the use of jailhouse informants has not been banned despite their frequent role in wrongful convictions. This insight suggests that reforms to prevent wrongful conviction cannot ignore their perceived or likely impact on conviction rates.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".