Revisiting the “web of impact”: A framework for foregrounding secondary actors in wrongful convictions cases

• In Event: Policy Panel: The Consequences of Wrongful Conviction

Abstract

Much of the innocence literature to date has framed wrongful convictions as primarily involving wrongfully convicted people themselves and the state actors that harmed them. More recently, however, researchers have recognized that reducing wrongful convictions to binary stories of innocent people versus the state elides their complexity. To address this over-simplification, we develop a linguistic framework that captures the roles played by the many actors involved in wrongful conviction cases who are neither representatives of the state nor the innocent people most directly harmed by the state in these cases. Through our framework, we accomplish three specific goals: First, we offer researchers and advocates the language to talk about people who play important roles in these cases, but who are too often mischaracterized or erased in conversations about wrongful convictions. Second, we call into question assumptions about the stability of various actors’ roles in wrongful convictions cases, arguing that it is important to recognize the temporality (the timing and sequencing) of these roles. Finally, we extend conversations about the “web of impact” of wrongful convictions.

Authors

• Clayton B. Drummond, George Mason University

• Janani Umamaheswar, George Mason University

• Robert Norris, George Mason University