“While cases like these often feature wrongdoing by individual prosecutors and police officers, a new study suggests the problem is deeper. After analyzing 50 wrongful convictions and other investigative failures, Texas State criminologists Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock found that confirmation bias, reinforced by groupthink and strong incentives to quickly identify the perpetrators of highly publicized crimes, figures prominently in the mistakes that send innocent people to prison.
“Once police decide they have the right suspect, Rossmo and Pollock report in the Northeastern University Law Review, they tend to develop “tunnel vision” that obscures other possibilities. They become focused on building a case against the person they’ve decided is guilty, ignore or minimize countervailing evidence, and interpret ambiguous evidence in a way that supports their initial conclusions.”
Read the article by Jacob Sullum in Reason.
Despite child sexual abuse declining by 60% between 1992 and 2010, states continue to legislate as if lenient sex offender laws are a national emergency. And, like so many other corners of the criminal justice system, the crackdown hasn’t affected all Americans equally. State registries are disproportionately black and overwhelmingly poor. As demonstrated by the recent case of Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire long accused of molesting underage girls, local prosecutors and judges have wide discretion to overlook wealthy offenders while imposing impossible restrictions on poorer ones.
“Laws punishing sex offenses are still becoming harsher and more exacting, even though reported sex crimes are declining—and in fact were already declining well before these laws were passed. In consequence, the numbers keep climbing: people convicted of sex offenses are a rapidly growing segment of the prison population—up to 30% in some states—while beyond the walls of the prison, additional punishments, provisions, and ‘collateral consequences’ have been added on, virtually all of them based on flawed diagnostics and unsound prognostication.”
“In 2006, advocates with the 
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