ABSTRACT
The past four decades have seen an explosion of international efforts to promote the rule of law. This chapter evaluates one aspect of the efficacy of those foreign-assistance investments, investments in criminal justice, to engage a comparative dialogue on their relationship to the risk of wrongful convictions in the hope that this dialogue will provoke a broader discussion of reforming America's foreign aid policy. The chapter contains both a descriptive and a normative element. The descriptive claim is that the criminal justice component of American foreign rule of law programs is asymmetrical, providing far more assistance to prosecutors and other law enforcement entities than it does to public defenders' offices and the defense bar. The normative claim is that this asymmetry is antithetical to justice and heightens the risk of wrongful convictions abroad.
