Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

164 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
and the validity of the original trial outcome, and misinterpretation or misrepresentation
of the original Bedau–Radelet data.
Interestingly, an independent analysis of eight New York cases from the
Bedau–Radelet study where allegedly innocent people were convicted and executed
(Acker et al., 1998), supported the conclusions by Bedau and Radelet of
their factual innocence.
In a recent book, Radelet, Bedau and Putman (1992) extended the original
350 cases of miscarriages of justice to 416 and provide a brief inventory of the
cases. The added 66 cases were wrongful convictions in homicide cases. The authors
state that they relied on two kinds of evidence to determine a miscarriage
of justice: first, ‘official judgments of error’, such as the reversal of a conviction
on appeal or a pardon (90% of their cases fall into this category). The evidence
for the second category of cases included is referred to as ‘unofficial judgments’
with new evidence or material suggesting innocence without a judicial action
being instigated. The authors concluded, on the basis of their analysis of the
416 cases as they did in their previous study, that miscarriages of justice are
caused by a number of different errors, often in combination, but the two most
common errors were perjury by prosecution witnesses and mistaken eyewitness
testimony. False confessions were also important in a number of the cases. In
a follow-up study to the book, Radelet, Lofquist and Bedau (1996) studied 68
cases of death row inmates who were released between 1970 and 1995 because
of doubts about their guilt. Thirty-one (46%) were not included in their previous
publications. The main conclusion drawn was:
. . . the details of these 68 cases strengthen our belief that the risk of executing
the innocent is not only inescapable, but also disturbingly high. This conclusion is
supported by an examination of the role of pure luck in exonerating the defendants
in our sample (p. 919).
As far as miscarriages of justice in Britain are concerned, these have recently
been discussed extensively in a book edited by Walker and Starmer (1999).
Matthews (1995) recommends that scientists apply probabilistic (Bayesian)
reasoning to judicial issues concerning DNA and confession evidence as a way
of reducing the risk of a miscarriage of justice:
As we now show, a Bayesian analysis of confessional evidence supports those who
adopt the sceptical view. A potentially dangerous counter-intuitive situation can
arise unless confessional evidence is assessed by a jury in the appropriate way
(p. 3).
THE LEO–OFSHE STUDY
Leo and Ofshe (1998a) have carried out a study of 60 cases of alleged police
coerced false confessions in the USA in the post-Miranda era (i.e. cases include
the period 1973 to 1996). In 29 (48%) of the cases defendants were ‘wrongfully
convicted’. Twenty-four (83%) of the defendants received long prison sentences
and four (14%) were sentenced to death, one of whom had already been executed
at the time of the study. Out of the remaining 31 cases, the case was either not