The Wrongful Convictions Reader

Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the "innocence revolution" has shaken the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and ineffective assistance of counsel.

Each chapter is divided into three sections:

• Readings
• Current Law Overview—which summarizes the key cases in the area, and
• Legal Materials, Exercises, and Media—which provides relevant experiential activities.

Examples from the Legal Materials, Exercises, and Media sections include:

• Recommended listening and viewing: timed excerpts from podcast episodes, films, and television clips
• Oral advocacy exercises: mock bail arguments, parole hearings, testimony before the state legislature, presentations to the state rules committee, appellate oral arguments
• Written advocacy exercises: practice motions and comparing state statutes
• Issue spotting exercises: transcripts from interrogations and in-court testimony
• Review: reflective essays, short answer questions, and true/false questions
• Team exercises: plea negotiations
• Discussion prompts
• Actual wrongful conviction case documents

This combination of materials makes the book more than a mere "reader" and makes it ideal for doctrinal as well as experiential courses.

A set of 392 PowerPoint slides, as well as other teaching materials, is available upon adoption of this book. Click here to view a sample PowerPoint presentation. If you are a professor using this book for a class, please contact Rachael Meier at remeier@cap-press.com to request your materials.