Wrongful Convictions: My Proposed Solution to Assembly Line Injustice
Our legal system is not just. The criminal justice system has become little more than an institution focused on efficiently placing people in prison, especially people of color. Prosecutors, the most powerful actors in the legal system, hold significant responsibility for how the system operates. Rather than prioritizing justice, they strive for convictions at the expense of innocent people. I believe that combining prosecutors’ offices and public defenders’ offices into a single entity and requiring attorneys to rotate through both positions would benefit the overall function of the legal system and result in more thoughtful prosecution, reducing miscarriages of justice.
Prosecutors’ power is centralized in their ability to choose what charges, if any, are brought against individuals. A prosecutor’s single decision can be the difference between felony charges, misdemeanor charges, or having a case dismissed entirely with no charges filed at all. Despite the importance of charging decisions, prosecutors face very little oversight. This is a system in which people are regularly sentenced to death, either by death penalty or “slow death,” life without the possibility of parole. Yet, since the National Registry of Exonerations began keeping track of wrongful convictions in 1989, they have recorded 2,793 exonerations. This amounts to more than 24,900 years that innocent people spent behind bars. The average exonerated person spent ten years in prison for a crime they never committed.
Prosecutors have a responsibility to ensure that the convictions they seek are justified. In 30% of exonerations, prosecutors were found to have committed misconduct that led to the wrongful conviction. Prosecutors value convictions over justice. This is most commonly displayed in the way prosecutors conduct the plea-bargaining process: despite the advantages they already have in the negotiation process, they overcharge people with charges for which they do not have evidence in order to secure plea deals. Given that 95% of criminal cases are resolved using plea deals, prosecutors essentially act as the judge and jury in the majority of cases. They decide that people are guilty, choose the charges under which to convict them, and decide their sentences. Additionally, many plea bargains require the accused people to waive their right to an appeal.
Public defenders are often too overworked and under-resourced to properly negotiate for the rights of their clients in the plea-bargaining process. Some are forced to “meet ’em and plead ‘em,” a practice in which they meet their clients literally minutes before accepting a plea deal. Even if public defenders have enough time to meet with their clients, they may not have the resources necessary to gather evidence to support their case. Despite the illegality, prosecutors may even withhold evidence that would exonerate the accused person. This significant power imbalance results in innocent people who plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. Last year, 22% of exonerations were for convictions based on guilty pleas. The actual number of innocent people imprisoned after pleading guilty is likely much higher because people who plead guilty are less likely to convince judges, lawyers, and even innocence organizations that they are actually innocent.
Prosecutors are not only at fault for their own actions that lead to wrongful convictions; prosecutors’ ethical standards suggest that they are also responsible for upholding justice throughout the entire process by prohibiting and preventing misconduct from other officials, such as police officers. The power and discretion of prosecutors puts them in the best position to hold police officers accountable for their misconduct and ensure that it does not result in a wrongful conviction. Police officer misconduct typically occurs through witness tampering, interrogation misconduct, fabricating evidence, and perjury. In all of these cases, prosecutors are the most likely officials (other than the police officers themselves) to know that misconduct occurred. Prosecutors can choose not to present fabricated evidence or coerced confessions at trial and can refuse to call a police officer who has a history of lying as a witness. If these decisions result in not having enough evidence to pursue the case at all, they can simply drop the charges, rather than prosecute a case with false evidence. Currently, many prosecutors choose to cover for police officers rather than expose their mistakes because they work closely with police departments and rely on that relationship, despite the harm it can cause to accused individuals.
Like most failings of the criminal justice system, Black people disproportionately bear the consequences of wrongful convictions. Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white people and spend an average three years longer in prison than white murder exonerees. Wrongful convictions not only impact those unjustly imprisoned, but also endanger our whole society. For every person who is convicted of a violent crime that they did not commit, there is a perpetrator who did commit that violent crime who is free and able to hurt more people. This was exactly what happened in a 1984 wrongful conviction case: Jennifer Thompson was sexually assaulted by knifepoint and later misidentified her attacker as Ronald Cotton. Cotton went to prison for ten years for a crime he did not commit, while the person who actually assaulted her, Bobby Poole, continued assaulting women after Cotton had been convicted. The wrongful conviction did irreparable harm to Ronald Cotton’s life and also to the women who should have never been assaulted by Bobby Poole.
My proposal to combine the prosecutors’ and public defenders’ offices into a single office in which attorneys must rotate through both positions would reduce the frequency of wrongful convictions in our criminal justice system. Official misconduct contributes to over half of the wrongful convictions in our legal system. Exonerations for wrongful convictions are necessary — they stop perpetuating injustice against the wrongfully convicted person and they open the possibility of imprisoning the person who actually committed the crime — but they carry a negative consequence. Every time the criminal justice system is exposed for imprisoning an innocent person, people lose confidence in the system. When people distrust the legal system, it encourages unlawful behavior and undermines justice. This makes it even more important to stop wrongful convictions before they can occur, and prosecutors are in the best position to prevent them from happening.
Prosecutors have immense power in the charging process; currently that power is often used to bring charges without sufficient evidence or withhold evidence of a person’s innocence. If prosecutors must also serve as public defenders and argue for people’s innocence, it would change their perspective, making them more likely to uphold a prosecutor’s ethical standards to “seek justice within the bounds of the law, not merely to convict.” They would scrutinize police officers and reject fabricated or false evidence. They would properly evaluate exculpatory evidence and drop charges rather than using deceitful tactics to push for a conviction. When they act as public defenders, they will prefer to be given enough time to confer with their clients regarding plea deals and they will understand how overcharging degrades justice. Therefore, in their rotation as prosecutors, they will be more likely to give the opposing public defenders enough time to review their cases and refrain from overcharging. The shifts in mindset associated with a one-office structure would result in a lower likelihood of wrongful convictions, and therefore a better system of justice.
