The Narratives of the Wrongfully Convicted

• In Event: NARRCRIM Panel 2 Narrative Criminology

Abstract

Narrative criminology focuses on how people experience wrongdoing and has, unsurprisingly focused on either victims or offenders. The experiences of wrongfully convicted people, whose identities as victims/offenders is often complex, is an area which has received limited attention in criminology generally, and specifically, there has been no consideration of how wrongfully convicted individuals narrate their experiences, or create their narratives around their identity as ‘innocent’.
For the wrongfully convicted, the wrongful conviction is both in the past, and in the present and continuing, and as such, narratives become more complex and difficult to construct, because the story doesn’t have an ‘end’. There is a need to explore how victims of wrongful convictions use/construct narratives to make sense of their experiences and indeed if they can do this at all. Wrongful conviction can be seen as a narrative disruption, and this paper explores how these narrative disruptions are experienced by the wrongfully convicted. This paper utilises Warr's (2019) work as a basis for examining how wrongfully convicted individuals navigate their way through the criminal justice system, and how they utilise their narrative labour (Warr 2019) to maintain their innocence.

Author

• Linda Asquith, Leeds Beckett University