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, legal filings 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 really “mass wrongful convictions” - an error built into the system on a scale that is unknown.
Bio: Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Brown University and an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation, in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court (Stanford Law Books, 2016), which won numerous awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. Her newest book, Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Wrongful Conviction (Random House), is the first account of “mass wrongful conviction” in the United States. Van Cleve has contributed articles to The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC News, and CNN. Her legal commentary has been featured on NPR, NBC News, CNN, and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.