Wrongful convictions are re-conceived as "organizational accidents" formed by latent system weaknesses and small errors. Lessons from error-avoiding systemic practices in aviation and medicine can be applied to criminal justice to reduce error.
Wrongful Conviction and Criminal Justice Reform: Making Justice, details the current issues of "innocence reform" and wrongful convictions, offering potential reforms that would enhance the criminal justice system and alleviate the problem of wrongful convictions. The work consists of 16 chapters detailing research and scholarship on innocence reform change in the justice system designed to reduce error and help exonerees, and represent the latest thinking on the subject. It is not a compendium of what has been learned about wrongful convictions since serious scholarship began in the 1980's, rather it examines the issues and processes related to wrongful conviction in the light of the policy reform process. The work is parsed into four discrete sections: Part I - Prelude: Approaches to Innocence Reform; Part II - Institutions of Innocence Reform; Part III - Changing the Criminal Justice System, that looks at issues concerning Police Investigation and Wrongful Convictions, Forensic Science's Reform Agenda, Prosecution Reactions to Innocence, Defense Counsel, New Models of Adjudication and Appeal, New Models for Establishing Innocence Post-Conviction, Death Penalty Directions, and Exoneree Compensation; and, finally, PART IV - Summation, in which the editors offer thoughts on the role played by actual innocence in stimulating reforms of the criminal justice system. Throughout the work, the authors stress that innocence reform is a vital aspect of wrongful conviction scholarship, the goal of which must be the continuous examination, and renewal, of the criminal justice system as it undertakes one of the most momentous actions of governmentdetermining guilt or innocence.