The overwhelming majority of criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through guilty pleas. To be constitutionally valid, guilty pleas must be knowing, voluntary, and intelligent. The information the defendant relies on to make a knowing, voluntary, and intelligent plea decision may be conveyed to the defendant through several modes, including but not limited to communication with defense counsel. Here, we address a mode that to our knowledge has previously not been systematically examined-tender-of-plea (ToP) forms. ToP forms are written instruments that inquire into whether the defendant understands and appreciates the plea decision and is capable of entering it. Using content analysis and comprehensibility measures, we examined a national sample of 208 tender-of-plea forms for both juvenile and adult defendants to determine what information they contained and their level of comprehensibility. The ToP forms were coded for several items concerning knowledge and voluntariness including rights waived, direct and collateral consequences, and capacity. Our findings show that the forms (a) are highly variable in their content, (b) exceed the reading comprehension of most defendants, and (c) are available more often to adult than to juvenile defendants. The implications of these findings are the forms should not be used to stand in place of "full and vigorous" judicial plea colloquies or meaningful defender-defendant discussions about plea decision-making. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research Summary:In this article, we examine criminal offending by true perpetrators after innocent people are arrested and convicted for their crimes. After investigating a set of cases in which DNA was used to exonerate the innocent and to identify the guilty party, we identified 109 true perpetrators, 102 of whom committed additional crimes. We found a total of 337 additional offenses committed by the true perpetrators, including 43 homicide-related and 94 sex offenses. By extrapolating from our findings, we estimate that the wrong-person wrongful convictions that occur annually may lead to more than 41,000 additional crimes. Policy Implications:Our findings indicate that one consequence of wrongful convictions, allowing the true perpetrators of crimes to remain at liberty and commit new crimes that imperil prospective victims, represents an important threat to public safety and thereby dramatically compounds the harms caused to innocents. We stress the importance of framing wrongful conviction issues to capture these important crime control concerns and, thus, to help galvanize public opinion and promote policy reforms that will mutually benefit adherents of both crime control and due process perspectives. K E Y W O R D Scrime control, due process, exoneration, framing, innocence, miscarriage of justice, true perpetrator, wrongful conviction, wrongful liberty

As wrongful conviction scholarship grows, some scholars have suggested that existing research on miscarriages of justice lacks theoretical grounding and methodological sophistication, arguing that the use of social science theory may help to better understand wrongful convictions. In this article, we suggest that it may be useful to draw upon conceptual frameworks found in traditional criminal justice studies, discuss what such approaches might suggest about miscarriages of justice, and begin to explore the questions or topics they may encourage interested researchers to pursue. Furthermore, through this broad theoretical lens, we can see that criminal justice theory is present, at least implicitly, in some existing innocence literature, and that making such theoretical connections more explicit may help to move the study of wrongful conviction into the mainstream of criminal justice research.

As more innocents are exonerated and researchers learn more about the causes of wrongful convictions, criminal justice practices have been altered to reduce the number of erroneous convictions, although reforms have varied widely in scope and substance throughout the nation. In this article, we provide an analysis of state-level investigative reforms important to the production of wrongful convictions as of mid-2016. Specifically, we collect and describe reform efforts in three investigatory areas: eyewitness identification, forensics, and interrogations. We then discuss wrongful conviction reforms and the innocence movement more generally, focusing on the importance of continued research into wrongful convictions as a critical policy issue in criminal justice.

Systematic reporting of data about wrongful conviction cases in the United States typically begins with 1989, the year of the country’s first post-conviction, DNA-based exonerations. Year-end 2018 thus concludes a full thirty years of information and marks a propitious time to take stock. In this article, we provide an overview of known exonerations, innocence advocacy, and wrongful conviction-related policy reforms in the U.S. during these three decades. First, we provide a brief history of wrongful convictions in the U.S. before turning to the modern era of innocence. We describe the key sources of data pertaining to wrongful convictions and exonerations. Then, using case data from the National Registry of Exonerations, we offer a detailed analysis of national and state-by-state trends in exonerations, including annual totals, DNA- and non-DNA-exonerations, and capital case exonerations. Our examination includes factors corresponding to sources of error, state death-penalty status, and regional differences. We then discuss innocence advocacy organizations, with a particular focus on Centurion Ministries and members of the Innocence Network. This is followed by an examination of state-by-state trends in innocence-related policy reforms on key issues as identified by the Innocence Project. The final section of the article discusses the many important matters we do not yet know about wrongful convictions and poses thoughts, questions, and ideas for continued scholarship focusing on miscarriages of justice. The Appendix provides state-by-state summaries of select information relating to wrongful convictions and innocence reforms.