The burden of innocence: coping with a wrongful imprisonment.

• Author: Campbell, Kathryn

With my feet and hands shackled, and confined in the prisoner's dock, I found myself replaying in my mind, every question and every answer. Certain that after seven days of trial proceedings ... that there could be only one conclusion ... not guilty. Hearing the facts [as told by] the judge ended the life that my wife and our children shared and delivered me to the world of a federal inmate--a journey that would last over one thousand days incarcerated, one thousand days an innocent man.

--Jason, wrongly convicted of sexual assault

Introduction

In recent years, the problem of wrongful conviction has generated much attention in academic and legal circles. A growing body of research, mainly from the United States, has highlighted several individual and systemic factors that may, either alone or in concert with one another, contribute to wrongful convictions. The single most important factor leading to wrongful convictions is said to be eyewitness error (Huff, Rattner, and Saragin 1986). However, other significant contributing factors include police and prosecutorial misconduct, an over-reliance on jailhouse informants, false confessions, racial discrimination, and erroneous forensic science. The empirical research in these areas is burgeoning (see Radelet, Bedau, and Putnam 1992; Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer 2000; Westervelt and Humphrey 2001), and in Canada, through a number of high-profile cases, the issue of wrongful conviction has come to the forefront of media and public discourses.

The focus of most research attention has been on exploring the inadequacies of the criminal justice system and the errors of criminal justice professionals in relation to wrongful convictions. While studies of this nature are essential, scant attention has been paid to those who suffer most from a wrongful conviction: the wrongly convicted individuals themselves. (2) Notably absent from the literature are the voices of the wrongly convicted and, in particular, accounts of their experiences and means of coping with a wrongful conviction, especially during imprisonment, as well as the consequences of maintaining their innocence throughout the criminal justice process. Maintaining one's innocence can, within the context of the judicial process, be perceived and experienced as a "burden" or liability, and it is of interest to explore how the wrongly convicted cope with this burden.

The purpose of this article is thus to uncover the voices of the wrongly convicted and to explore their experiences with wrongful arrest, conviction, and imprisonment, as well as to examine the consequences of maintaining their innocence throughout the criminal justice process. To this end, five wrongly convicted Canadians were interviewed in 2002. The article begins by examining respondents' experiences with arrest and then traces their coping strategies while incarcerated. There follows a discussion of the consequences of maintaining one's innocence during imprisonment. The problems experienced by the respondents following release are then examined. The discussion and conclusion address the implications of this research for criminal justice policy and practice, as well as means of preventing further miscarriages of justice.

Methodology

The study employed a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, using interviews and content analysis. This approach was chosen because it is considered suitable for research that attempts to uncover people's experiences and the meaning they make of those experiences (Rubin and Rubin 1995). Moreover, qualitative research can give depth and detail to phenomena that are difficult to convey with quantitative methods, as it is not concerned with ensuring representativeness or making inferences about the broader population from a selected sample (Mason 1996; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). This is an important consideration when exploring the experiences of an under-researched group, such as the wrongly convicted. The narratives of these members of marginalized groups offer meaningful accounts of the ways in which the world is organized according to the oppressions they have experienced (Ferraro and Moe 2003; Sandoval 2000).

Five individuals were interviewed for this study; each had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned. In this sense, their experiences represent the worst-case scenarios of wrongful conviction, as they all endured long-term imprisonment. Aside from the wrongful conviction, there were no specific criteria for inclusion in this study. All of the participants were Caucasian males, and they ranged in age from 31 to 65 years of age. Four of the five participants were recruited for the study through an association that provides legal counsel and support to the wrongly convicted and assists such individuals in the process of exoneration. The remaining respondent was contacted following media attention to his case and had expressed an interest in participating in the study.

The participants spent an average of five years (range = 34 years) in prison for crimes they did not commit. To date, four of the five respondents have been fully exonerated by the courts. Sam (3) was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, who had accidentally choked to death. He served more than eight years in a maximum-security prison before being freed on appeal, where he was later exonerated. Sean was wrongly convicted of the murder of a shopkeeper and served five and a half years in prison. While on appeal; and fearful of further judicial error, Sean pled guilty to a lesser charge and is currently attempting to overturn that guilty plea. Jason was convicted of sexual assault and served more than three years in prison, a great deal of it in solitary confinement. He was later acquitted on appeal. Mark was wrongly convicted of sexual assault and served three and a half years in prison. His 690 application (4) was successful, and he was subsequently acquitted of this crime. Max was wrongly convicted of robbery and assault. He served five years in prison, with 10 additional years on parole in the community. He was acquitted on appeal many years later. At the time of their interviews, all of the participants were seeking some form of compensation and/or acknowledgement of error from the Canadian government.

For the content analysis, transcripts were read by both authors and annotated according to consistent and concurrent themes identified by them. Once the emergent thematic categories were applied to the entire transcript, it was necessary to consider the range of participants' perspectives and experiences for each theme. In examining the accounts given by the wrongly convicted persons interviewed for this study, no assumption was made that they represented the objective truth of all persons wrongly convicted. However, the information conveyed during the interviews was taken as evidence of their own interpretation of their experience, which was then further interpreted by the researchers.

Results

Experiences of arrest

Since contact with the police is the first point of entry into the criminal justice system, it is not surprising that police investigative practices are often a central focus in wrongful conviction cases (Denov and Campbell 2003). Early on in an investigation, police are frequently under a great deal of pressure to find a suspect, particularly in crimes of violence. This pressure may contribute to wrongful convictions, as the highly charged and politicized environment generated by high-profile cases may inadvertently force police to act quickly, without considering all possible suspects and all of the available evidence (Martin 2001: 79). This was the case for several of the interviewees in this study. Sean describes the panic in his small town following the murder of a local shopkeeper, which fuelled a sense of urgency on the part of the police to find a suspect:

They're getting pressure from the town for sure ... the town's going nuts ... There's a killer loose and he's killing people in scores, hard-working people ... there was a lot of pressure. (Sean) (5) As a result of such situations, the police may feel great pressure to arrest a suspect, extract a confession, and obtain a conviction. While most do not, some police have been found to resort to abusive and illegal practices in obtaining a conviction. Such practices are often rationalized as "noble cause corruption," which has been described as a necessary tactic, the ends justifying the means (Wood 1997). As is consistent with the literature on police pressure tactics, several of the interviewees, in recounting their experiences during arrest, gave blatant examples of police misconduct. They reported clear instances of abuse, brutality, and coercion, as well as explicit violations of their right to due process. Sean vividly describes his brutal treatment at the hands of the police when arrested, with three other individuals, for a murder none of the four had had anything to do with:

I was arrested January twenty-second and they held me for seventeen and a half hours without food, without water, without going to the bathroom ... they kicked the shit out of us ... they beat the living shit out of us because I could hear C screaming, I could hear L screaming. They wanted me to sign ... they had a statement all made out. The story was there ... I said it's not me, it's not me, it's not me. I had no right to a lawyer, I had no right to food, no right to talk to my parents, or anything. (Sean) In some cases, furthermore, the interviewees explained that they felt personally targeted by the police. This practice has been described as "tunnel vision,": police focus on one individual, for whatever reason, and seem convinced of that person's guilt in spite of a lack of evidence (Martin 2001). Having therefore failed to undertake proper investigative procedures, the police may then fail to see exculpatory signs and focus their efforts solely on confirming the guilt...