At the start of his talk, Dr Simon Cole let his audience know that his title would have a slightly delayed payoff.
“If that’s what you’re here for, I’d recommend you go, take a walk, and come back at the end,” he joked.
Indeed, Dr Cole’s title, “Is Medico-legal Death Investigation Really Five Times Worse in Canada than in the United States?” was less an introduction to his topic, and more a single example within the larger topic and research area of exonerations within the American legal system, and a demonstration of what exoneration registries can do.
Dr Cole is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, and is a Cecil H and Ida Green Visiting Professor at the college. He is also the co-editor of the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), a database of individuals and groups in the United States who have been exonerated of crimes for which they were convicted.
Dr Cole explained that exonerations are neither a legal category nor do they have any legal definition—you won’t hear a judge use the word “exonerated” in court. An exoneration, as it is defined for use in the NRE, is when “a person who has been convicted of a crime is officially cleared after new evidence of innocence becomes available.” More precisely, the person must be relieved of all related convictions based on either new evidence, new individual consideration of the case, and/or lack of physical evidence of guilt.
What is the value of studying exonerations? According to Dr Cole, it’s because exonerations can be studied. He explained that wrongful convictions—or individuals being punished for crimes they did not commit—are a topic of great interest to many researchers in law, sociology, and forensic science. We have no direct way to know how many people in the US prison system didn’t actually commit the crimes they were convicted of, but it is possible to know how many people were exonerated of their crimes. In short, not all instances of wrongful convictions can be studied, but those who are exonerated can be.
Dr Cole explained that exonerations are brought to the attention of the NRE in a variety of different ways, including word of mouth, press accounts, legal database dragnets, and compensation awards, which about 40% of US exonerees receive. Once NRE researchers identify an exoneration for inclusion in the database, the team obtains the source documents, codes the case (and all 100 variables per case), and then writes a narrative describing the case. The narrative is often written by former journalists, with the intention that it read like a short article about the case and the exoneree. The NRE helps researchers, media, and the public understand and interpret information about patterns within exonerations, especially to answer questions on the contributing factors that led individuals to be convicted in the first place.
The majority of cases within the NRE are from 1989 onwards—the year when the first DNA exoneration took place. There are now 3738 cases within the registry. As we looked through the registry with Dr Cole, we learned that false accusation was the most frequent contributing factor to previous wrongful convictions, and that Illinois was the state with the most wrongful convictions. Dr Cole also reviewed the group registry, which contains a further 37,333 individuals exonerated in larger groups. It should be noted that Dr Cole’s NRE is not the only existing exoneration
registry—several other countries and regions, including Canada, are beginning to develop their own.
At this point, Dr Cole returned to the topic of medico-legal death investigations, including forensic pathology, and how it is currently practiced in the US. As Dr Cole explained, there are currently only 500 forensic pathologists in the US, while around 1200 are necessary to do the work of investigating criminally suspicious deaths. For this reason, in many instances coroners and doctors—who are not certified by the American Board of Pathology—conduct these investigations. In 151 NRE cases, errors in medico-legal death investigations have been identified as a contributing factor. NRE researchers have concluded that board-certified pathologists were involved in 93 of these cases.
Dr Cole also addressed the limitations of exoneration registries. He explained that they can’t tell us about all wrongful convictions, especially low-level convictions with minimal punishment. In most such cases, by the time they could be exonerated, the impacted individual would probably have already moved through the prison system. Registries also don’t weigh the relative contribution of different types of evidence—such as eyewitness identification or erroneous forensic science—to any given wrongful conviction. Finally, registries are unable to predict future wrongful convictions.
It was then that Dr Cole returned to the question with which he began his talk: Is medico-legal death investigation really five times worse in Canada than in the United States? The answer is complicated. While different national registries make it now possible to compare exonerations across countries, the data sizes are often drastically different. Given a much smaller set of cases in the Canadian registry, and other structural differences between the US and Canadian legal systems, we are not yet able to accurately compare the prevalence of particular contributing factors across these two registries, systems, and nations. For example, when you look at Canada’s exoneration database, errors in medico-legal death investigation appear five times more frequently as a contributing factor than in the US registry. However, this prevalence is largely attributable to a significant number of wrongful convictions associated with a single pathologist, skewing the smaller Canadian registry. There is still much work to be done with such registries before useful national comparisons can occur.
In the end, Dr Cole’s title was both technically accurate and contextually misleading —and highlighted a larger area of study that is still to be mined. It was a fascinating talk, and I pity anybody who took a walk instead of staying in the Coach House to hear it; they missed a wonderful conversation about exonerations and opportunities for research into wrongful convictions in the United States and Canada.
Simon A Cole is Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, and co-editor of the National Registry of Exonerations. His research focuses on science and technology in the criminal legal system, particularly forensic science. He is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2003 Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science, and a co-author of Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008, with Michael Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan).
Post by: Claire Donnan, Green College content writer and resident member.