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Article
Smoke But No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted Of Crimes That Never Happened
American Criminal Law Review
  • Jessica S. Henry, Montclair State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-1-2018
Abstract

Nearly one-third of exonerations involve the wrongful conviction of an innocent person for a crime that never actually happened, such as when the police plant drugs on an innocent person, a scorned lover invents a false accusation, or an expert mislabels a suicide as a murder. Despite the frequency with which no-crime convictions take place, little scholarship has been devoted to the subject. This Article seeks to fill that gap in the literature by exploring no-crime wrongful convictions as a discrete and unique phenomenon within the wrongful convictions universe. This Article considers three main factors that contribute to no-crime wrongful convictions: official misconduct in the form of police lies, aggressive policing tactics, and prosecutorial malfeasance; the mislabeling of a non-criminal event as a crime; and outright fabrications by informants and non-governmental witnesses with motivations to lie. This Article then provides an empirical analysis of existing data from the National Registry of Exonerations about no-crime exonerations and compares data between no-crime exonerations and actual-crime exonerations in terms of contributing factors, crime types, and race and gender distinctions. In doing so, this Article demonstrates that no-crime wrongful convictions, where a person is convicted of a crime that did not occur, are materially different from actual-crime wrongful convictions, where the wrong person is convicted of a crime that did occur but was committed by another. Finally, this Article concludes with policy reform recommendations that specifically seek to reduce the incidence of no-crime wrongful convictions.

Published Citation
Henry, Jessica, Smoke but No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted of Crimes That Never Happened (March 13, 2018). American Criminal Law Review, Volume 55, Spring 2018.
Citation Information
Jessica S. Henry. "Smoke But No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted Of Crimes That Never Happened" American Criminal Law Review (2018)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jessica-henry/2/