Abstract
A publishing event in 2000—Actual Innocence by Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld and journalist Jim Dwyer—announced the advent of the innocence movement. A substantial library of books (and thousands of scholarly articles) written since 2000 have analyzed wrongful convictions and their consequences. The genres range from scholarly monographs and anthologies to true crime. A few books are designed or are adaptable for use in law school or social science classrooms. Every wrongful conviction book is didactic, as even true crime accounts of specific false convictions try to explain why a crime investigation snared an innocent person. While all scholarly accounts draw on wrongful conviction narratives, some focus on single causes or issues while others cover a range.
And quite a range it is. Every element in an investigation, prosecution, and adjudication can misfire. Wrongful conviction literature examines the forensic sciences, eyewitness identification, investigative error, interrogations and false confessions, the psychology of justice system error, legal issues (from plea bargaining through habeas corpus), informants, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, the psychological effects of wrongful conviction, public policy aspects of wrongful conviction reforms, and the innocence movement itself.
Among the volumes in the wrongful conviction library, Mark Godsey’s Blind Justice is unique. It is in part a memoir by an attorney and director of one of the more than fifty innocence organizations (the preferred generic title of “innocence projects”) operating in the United States today and in part a didactic explanation of wrongful convictions. These two elements blend seamlessly into an attention-grabbing book that powerfully instructs.
Godsey’s impossible-to-replicate book is a conversion narrative, a “personal journey” (p. 3) of his transition from an experienced federal prosecutor, indeed “a prosecutor’s prosecutor” (p. 3), to an innocence lawyer who has freed at least 25 innocent prisoners. When he became a law school professor, he grudgingly agreed to fill in for an innocence clinic director on sabbatical, skeptical that a client’s innocence would be proven. In the early 2000s, when innocence consciousness was in its infancy, Godsey’s skepticism was the norm. But he was blindsided—the DNA exoneration of the client, Herman May, upset all his professional experience and opened a path to professional enlightenment. Today, as knowledge of actual innocence is widespread, as wrongful conviction courses are taught in law schools, and as prosecutor’s offices are beginning to institute “conviction integrity units” to correct errors of justice, it is less likely that a prosecutor would encounter a wrongful conviction with a sense of disbelief turning to wonder.
Godsey puts his sense of wonder and his experiences to good use. In six substantive chapters (“Blind Denial,” “Blind Ambition,” “Blind Bias,” “Blind Memory,” “Blind Intuition,” and “Blind Tunnel Vision”), he draws on personal experiences and on research literature to instruct readers about several standard and several not-so-standard issues that help to explain why wrongful convictions occur.
Blind Justice reviews a number of familiar wrongful conviction topics including errors in forensic science (“Blind Bias”); errors in eyewitness identification, false confessions, and witness memory (“Blind Memory”); errors that stem from the misinterpretation of demeanor (“Blind Intuition”); and tunnel vision and heuristics (“Blind Tunnel Vision”). His explanations of these causal factors blend research findings with stories drawn from his own Ohio cases and from other narratives that bring home the ways in which forensic examiners, police, and prosecutors are misled by their cognitive biases to pursue false leads. To his credit, Godsey makes it clear that no one is free from cognitive biases by including personal accounts of his experiences where his own needs blinded him to truths obvious to others.
The subtitle to Blind Justice alerts us to the book’s unifying theme: that wrongful convictions are grounded in psychology and politics. Chapter 2, “Blind Denial,” explores the powerful psychological roots of one of the most bizarre aspects of wrongful convictions in America—the blatant refusal of prosecutors, police, and judges to recognize wrongful convictions when the facts are so blazingly obvious to external observers. The deniers seem either perverse or possessed. Godsey explains this phenomenon by drawing on well-established research related to cognitive dissonance, administrative evil, and the dehumanization of others that leads otherwise good people to commit evil acts.
The politics theme is displayed in Chapter 3, “Blind Ambition.” Godsey details how police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and even defense attorneys are trapped by their institutional roles to lean toward conviction or to oppose exonerations in postconviction proceedings where evidence of guilt is entirely eroded. He attributes this largely to the election of prosecutors and judges, which supports a culture of conviction. While this knowledge is not entirely new, Blind Justice is excellent in drawing together the way in which politics affects all these institutions and actors. General knowledge about this harmful phenomenon is one thing. It is quite another when Godsey describes his culture shock in transitioning from the federal system of appointed judges to the system of a locally elected judge, oblivious to overwhelming evidence of innocence, who blatantly supports “mmyyyyyy prosecutors” (p. 62). It is clear that despite the growth of innocence reforms regarding lineup and interrogation procedures, the country has a long way to go before the justice system becomes a truly level playing field.
Blind Justice, instructive and passionate, is an excellent introduction to major wrongful conviction themes. It is an accessible book for laypersons and criminologists who are new to the subject. It would make a lively text in a wrongful conviction course. One wishes that it would be read by prosecutors across America. If they did, perhaps like the author, they would say, as the hymn Amazing Grace has it—“was blind but now I see.”