ABSTRACT
In recent history, convictions of the innocent and other miscarriages of justice in Western democracies have been more prevalent than commonly thought.1 The notion of a balanced criminal justice system capable of weeding out false testimony, mistaken identifications, poorly collected or processed scientific evidence, and other errors is, in practice, far less successful than it should be. In Great Britain, fabricated or coerced confessions and other falsified evidence have been responsible for notorious wrongful convictions such as those involving the Guildford Four2 and the Birmingham Six,3 who were accused of several murderous bombings attributed to the Irish Republican Army. In the United States, the Innocence Project4 has exonerated through DNA testing 197 people convicted of serious crimes,5 some of whom were on Death Row. In the State of Illinois, Governor George Ryan, a death penalty supporter, imposed in January 2000 a moratorium on executions after 13 men on Illinois Death Row were exonerated by DNA.6 And in Canada, a small but increasing number of convictions have been overturned where the accused were factually innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted.
