Abstract:
The field of law largely dismisses wrongful convictions as rare exceptions in an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine. Wrongful convictions are either dismissed as a product of incompetence or corruption rather than a product of police technique that is institutionalized. This research offers a novel intervention in the field of wrongful convictions by examining how racial stigma embeds in the seemingly race-blind, fact-finding stage of criminal investigations. Using historical ethnography, archives, and interviews, this study shows how wrongful conviction is a product of police technique that is institutionalized like a shadow system of justice. In this system, police officers have such a monopoly on what constitutes truth that their lying is redefined as “building a case.” Where there is no physical evidence linking a person to a crime, police can extract a confession and place their own words in the suspects’ mouths; they can ignore or bury exonerating evidence and threaten witnesses with arrest. These tactics – in varying doses - create the illusion of a spontaneous eruption of guilt. This unchecked system leads one to consider whether the numbers that researchers refer to as “mass incarceration” are, in actuality, “mass wrongful convictions” - a margin of error built into the system on a scale that is unknown.