Arye Rattner

Convicted but innocent

Legal literature from the beginning of the century, as well as more recent studies, furnish us with accounts of cases of innicent men and women who were tried and convicted of serious crimes throughout the United States. This study surveys the literature on those cases and describes these wrongful convictions by the distribution of offenses, of sentences, of actual punishment inflicted, and types of error contributing to the wrongful conviction.

Guilty Until Proved Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy

Few problems can pose a greater threat to free, democratic societies than that of wrongful conviction—the conviction of an innocent person. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to this problem, perhaps because of our understandable concern with the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system in combatting crime. Drawing on our own database of nearly 500 cases of wrongful conviction, our survey of criminal justice officials, and our review of extant literature on the subject, we address three major questions: (1) How frequent is wrongful conviction? (2) What are its major causes? and (3) What policy implications may be derived from this study?

Age, Crime, and the Early Life Course

The age distribution of criminal activity peaks in the mid to late teen years and declines thereafter. Recently, Hirschi and Gottfredson have argued that the shape of the age distribution is invariant across social groups and that this shape is unexplained by any known st of sociological variables. They also assert that longitudinal data and models are not necessary to explain delinquency. The present investigation employs longitudinal data on the early life histories of an Israeli male birth cohort to test these assertions and fails to reject them. The shape of the age distribution does not vary sigificantly across ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious orthodoxy groups; nor can it be explained in terms of age variations in marital status, employment, and schooling. However, contrary to Hirschi and Gottfredsons assertion concerning longitudinal data, it is demostrated that in the absence of such data, several parameters of the estimated models would have been biased.

Between commandments and laws: Religiosity, political ideology, and legal obedience in Israel

This paper presents three surveys designed to examine the effect ofreligiosity and political ideology on legal disobedience among Israeli citizens. In addition to samples of the general Jewish population (N = 1,728), thesurveys included samples of three groups characterized by a combinationof religiosity and right-wing political orientation: Yeshiva (religiousseminary) students (N = 464), ultra-orthodox Jews (N = 217), andsettlers in the occupied territories (N = 361). The results show thatacceptance of the rule of law is weaker among ultra-orthodox andright-wing respondents. Furthermore, compared to the general populationof Jews, Yeshiva students and ultra-orthodox Jews expressed lower levelsof commitment to legal obedience. Comparison of attitudes before andafter the occurrence of controversial legal and political events indicated thatsuch events have a generalized effect on legal obedience.

Procedural justice, minorities, and religiosity

The current research explores six hypotheses derived from the well-known procedural justice-based model of legitimacy in two different religious groups in Israel, and adds to the model the effect of religiosity on the perceived legitimacy of rules and institutions of social control. Our results, based on data from a representative sample of 1,216 Israeli Jews and Arabs, provide general support for the hypotheses. We found that the social order is perceived as less legitimate by the Arab minority compared with the Jewish majority, and by highly religious members of the Jewish majority compared with those who are less religious.

Sentencing Outcomes in a Multinational Society When Judges, Defendants and Victims Can Be either Arabs or Jews

The focus of this paper is the effect of nationality on prison disposition in Israel. An interaction between the nationality of the judge, the perpetrator and the victim is examined. The data were collected in the northern district courts in Israel and consist of 1394 court records. The results show that being an Arab defendant is an inherent liability in the Israeli criminal justice system – they are more likely than Jews to receive prison sentences. Arab judges seem to be more punitive than their Jewish colleagues are. The nationality of the victim plays a significant role only in cases tried by Arab judges. In the case of an Arab judge and a Jewish victim the likelihood of an Arab defendant getting a prison sentence is higher than when the victim is an Arab. This leads to a consideration of the effect of stereotypes and the majority–minority and in–out group relations on the performance of the justice system.

Structural Models of Injustice and Illegalism in Israel

The question of whether a citizen is obliged to obey the law has occupied scholarly thinking since the days of Socrates. Thus, rarely has the question been examined empirically. Based on a survey of 1866 adults, citizens of the state of Israel, this study attempts to construct causal models linking socioeconomic status to subjective measures of injustice, and further to indicators of illegalism and disobedience among Jews and Arabs. LISREL analysis has been found a useful tool to construct the empirical models that measure how members of the two ethnic communities relate to the boundaries of the “prima facie obligation” to obey the law. Findings show that those who have no trust in one part of the legal system, will also have no trust in the rest of the system which, in turn, serves to legitimize taking the law into ones own hand.

The Israeli criminal justice system in action—Is justice administered differentially?

This study focuses on two major junctures in the Israeli criminal justice system, the preadjudication stage and the trial stage. The data are gathered from records accumulated during the period 1980 through 1992. For each year between 1980 and 1992, a random sample of 3637 persons, who had their first police contact that year, was drawn from the computerized central file at Israeli Police Headquarters. A total of 40,007 individuals, with a total of 97,000 records, constituted the study population. The results identify which criminal records were most likely to be terminated prior to adjudication and which records, once adjudicated, were most likely to conclude in conviction. Major emphasis was placed on the issue of nationality—being an Arab or a Jew—while the effect of other variables, such as the type of offense and the time period, were controlled. The criminal justice system was found to be less discriminating at the early stages of the criminal process, but as the offender moved along the process, the chances that nationality would play an important part increased.

The effect of legal and extralegal variables on sentencing in Israel

A review of the research literature on racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system yields mixed conclusions. Little attention has been devoted to decision making related to nationality and ethnicity in the criminal justice system in Israel. The study examines the effect of legal and extralegal variables on prison sentencing among Jews and Arabs, based on one 1989 data set. The probability of an Arab being sentenced to prison increases with the offenders level of dangerousness. A different effect, however, is shown for property offenses than for violent offenses.

Social Distance and Misidentification

The present study examines the impact of national and ethnic divisions on misidentification. In that respect this study is the first of its kind. The study of misidentification on the national level involves a comparison of Israeli and Canadian samples, while the cross-ethnic aspect of the study relies on a comparison of three ethnic groups within the Israeli sample. The findings from the experimental test of identification ability reveal that national distinction (Canadian-Israeli), as well as the inter-society grouping (AshkenazicSephardic-Arab), affect the amount of both types of errors: nonidentification and false identification. The comparison of the ethnic distance (within society) to the national distance (between societies) suggests that the national distance separating societies is far more powerful as a cause for both types of errors than the ethnic distance separating groups within a society. Few problems pose a greater threat to the principle of justice in democratic societies than wrongful conviction. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of the conviction of innocents and its causes. Drawing on a study of nearly 500 cases of wrongful convictions in the United States, Huff and his colleagues (1986) found eyewitness misidentification to be the most frequent reason for wrongful conviction. The question of recognition ability has intrigued both social scientists and legal experts. Many of the studies and experiments that focused on the factors affecting misidentification revealed the impact of race on recognition ability. The main avenue of research, mostly by means of laboratory experiments, has been to investigate whether people identify members of their own race better than members of another