Live Webinar           September 9, 2025 at 12 pm

Wrongful Convictions and Their Causes

Presented by Thomas B. Schmidt, III, Esquire

The Innocence Movement has its origins in 1984, when Alex Jeffreys, a British geneticist, discovered human DNA variation and realized that DNA “fingerprinting” could be an important tool in criminal investigations. In 1992, Barry Schenck and Peter Neufeld founded the Innocence Project to use the DNA technology in investigating claims of innocence.  Their work inspired the formation of many innocence projects, including in Pennsylvania  in 2009.  Since then, more than 30 men and women incarcerated in Pennsylvania have been freed through the efforts of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, after serving collectively more than 800 years.  There are ample reasons to believe that many more innocent people remain incarcerated in this state.

The Innocence Movement has shown us that (1) the criminal justice system is more fallible than we had supposed, and (2) the protection of the innocent should be a goal of the criminal justice system with the same importance as the conviction of the guilty.

This presentation will be primarily about the first point.  The thousands of cases that have thus far resulted in exonerations show that, contrary to our assumptions and expectations, there are four principal causes of wrongful convictions: (1) official misconduct, (2) bad forensics, (3) witness misidentification, and (4) false confessions.   This presentation will describe these causes in some detail and how the Pennsylvania criminal justice system is responding to prevent the conviction of innocent people.

Approved by NFPA and Keystone Alliance of Paralegal Associations for one substantive credit.