Donal E. J. MacNamara

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?

The Homosexual as a Crime Victim

The development of the criminological subdiscipline of victimology has demonstrated convincingly that there are subsocietal groups for whom the probability of their members becoming victims of crime is disproportionate to their numbers. The risk rate is higher for these groups than for others, for a variety of reasons: (a) they are more likely to have what the criminal wants, or the criminal so believes; (b) they are more frequently present in high-crime areas, in situations in which plots are hatched and crimes committed, or where there are temptations that lead to victimisation; (c) they are defined as physically weaker than others and hence are liable to be “chosen” as easy targets by offenders; (d) they are believed to have relatively little access to law enforcement agencies and seats of power; (e) they are viewed as persons unlikely to use law enforcement agencies; (f) they are engaged in activities that lend themselves to manipulation by predators; (g) they participate in high-risk activities, either because of personality traits or because of goals that make the risk a necessity for assurance of success; and (h) they live on the periphery of society, and receive so little social support for their activities that the normal constraints of ordinary persons are neutralised, because the latter define the victim as worthless.

Book Reviews : Crime, Law, and Society, Frank E. Hartung. Pp. 320. Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1965.

relationships to each other. Then it traces, step by step, a few common cases. A traffic offense, a robbery prosecution, a bill collection, a personal injury claim, and a divorce suit are analyzed with a view to showing how they are started, moved forward, and concluded. Here the roles of the parties, the witnesses, the lawyers, the jurors, the trial judge, and the appellate court are explained. Next