U.Va. Law Professor Brandon Garrett's Book Examines Wrongful Convictions.

False confessions, invalid forensic analysis, eyewitness misidentifications and other systemic flaws in the criminal justice system contributed to the wrongful conviction of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA tests, University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett writes in "Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong," published this spring by Harvard University Press.

Garrett began by studying the original criminal trial records of the 250 people who were convicted of series crimes and later exonerated. "The goal was to see what patterns there are," he said.

In a way, it would have been a comfort if the wrongful convictions had resulted from idiosyncratic mistakes or even corruption, Garrett said. That would suggest that false convictions are exceedingly rare, as nearly all police officers, prosecutors and judges conscientiously seek to convict the guilty and free the innocent, he said.

"What I found, though, was that the errors that repeated over and over again across the 250 cases were the result of bad barrels, and not a few bad apples. They resulted from unsound but systemic practices that allowed well-intentioned people to contribute to convicting the innocent," he said.

Those practices included the use of suggestive eyewitness identification procedures, flawed forensic analysis, coercive interrogations, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias and poor lawyering, he said.

What was particularly haunting about the cases, Garrett said, was that at the time, before the DNA tests proved the convict's innocence, many of the prosecutions appeared uncannily strong. For example, some cases included false confessions in which innocent suspects seemingly supplied police with details of a crime that police claimed could only be known by the perpetrator. The false confessions were typically the result of long, undocumented interrogations in which investigators may have planted details of the crime with the suspect, he said.


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