Gendering Wrongful Conviction: Focal Concerns, ‘Normal Crimes,’ and Women’s Experiences of Miscarriage of Justice

• In Event: Miscarriages of Justice: New Perspectives on Innocence Issues

Abstract

One of the most significant contemporary social movements in criminal justice tackles the problem of wrongful conviction, and has resulted in more than 1300 exonerations over the last quarter century, along with significant reforms across a number of criminal justice domains. This work has opened up important avenues for investigating the operation of criminal justice, though criminologists have thus far played a limited role in this effort. Recent calls to better develop conceptual and theoretical frameworks for understanding the causes and consequences of wrongful conviction provide a means for thinking critically about how feminist criminology can contribute to this process. Here we explore how the specific evidentiary foci of the wrongful conviction movement—for example, witness misidentification and DNA—frame the identification and investigation of wrongful conviction cases in gendered ways. We draw from both prominent and lesser known case studies to highlight how several conceptual tools in criminology, including focal concerns perspectives on criminal justice decision-making and Sudnow’s concept of ‘normal crimes,’ can contribute to our understanding of women’s experiences of miscarriages of justice. In doing so, we suggest that the dominant definitions of and interventions upon wrongful convictions can have significant gendered consequences.

Authors

• Elizabeth Webster, Rutgers University

• Jody Miller, Rutgers University