| The causes of wrongful convictions include direct causes, external causes and psychological causes. The psychological causes, including tunnel vision, confirmation bias, belief perseverance, reiteration effect, hindsight bias, outcome bias, noble cause corruption, emotional attachment, motivational bias and goal pursuit, play a decisive role in producing wrongful convictions. Most of the direct causes, such as extorting confession by torture, concealing exculpatory evidence, and not accepting argument of counsel, are just the manifestations of these biases in criminal justice. The reason why most of the external causes, such as the unreasonable performance measurement system, the pressure on police to solve high-profile cases quickly, lack of funds, and short of hands, contribute to wrongful convictions is that they reinforce the influence of these biases on the actors of the criminal justice. The process of wrongful conviction can be conceived on the basis of the potential influence of these biases. Put simply, the investigator misclassifies an innocent man as the criminal even the evidence against him is very weak, then he focuses too quickly or exclusively on this suspect, selects and filters the evidence that build a case for conviction, interprets the exculpatory evidence as either irrelevant or supportive of guilt, while ignoring or suppressing evidence that points away from guilt. The twenty two Chinese wrongful convictions corrected recently could be used to illustrate the way in which these biases affect the thinking and actions of police, prosecutors and judges. To minimize the influence of these biases on police, prosecutors and judges, so as to help the criminal justice system perform more accurately and reliably, the actors of the system should be educated and trained about the consequences, nature and effects of these biases. A variety of reasonable management and supervision practices should be adopted in police and prosecution institutions, transparency at all stages of the criminal process should be increased, and rights of defense should be better protected. |
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