The public needs to have confidence in the criminal justice system, or else they will lose faith in reporting crime. By ensuring those who commit the most serious violent crimes spend the bulk of their sentences in prison, we send a clear message that we are on the side of victims. Overly confident testimony by expert witnesses can also lead to miscarriages of justice. The credibility of expert witnesses depends on numerous factors - in particular, their credentials, personal likability and self-confidence which all impact on how believable they are. The confidence with which experts present their evidence has also been noted to influence jurors, who tend to assume that a witness who is anxious or nervous is lying. [18] The manner in which experts testify may have a greater impact on judges and lawyers who prefer experts who provide clear, unequivocal conclusions. [22] Scholars, including Judith Shklar, Edmond Cahn and Barrington Moore Jr. have surveyed anthropological and historical work on injustice, concluding that the sense of injustice is found everywhere there are men and women; it is a human universal. [5] [9] [10] The first is the number of exonerations where the guilty verdict has been vacated or annulled by a judge or higher court after new evidence has been brought forward proving the 'guilty' person is, in fact, innocent. Since 1989, the Innocence Project has helped overturn 375 convictions of American prisoners with updated DNA evidence. [5] However, DNA testing occurs in only 5 to 10% of all criminal cases, and exonerations achieved by the Innocence Project are limited to murder and rape cases. This raises the possibility that there may be many more wrongful convictions for which there is no evidence available to exonerate the defendant. Studies cited by the Innocence Project estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent. [6] However, a more recent study looking at convictions in the state of Virginia during the 1970s and 1980s and matching them to later DNA analysis estimates a rate of wrongful conviction at 11.6%. [7] Xiaofeng, Wu (2011). "An Analysis of Wrongful Convictions in China". Oklahoma City University Law Review. 36: 451.

Rafter, N. (1990). "The Social Construction of Crime and Crime Control". Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 27 (4): 376–389. doi: 10.1177/0022427890027004004. S2CID 145629782. For more on the substantial difference in judges' decisions depending on time since last food break, see chpt 3 of Thinking, Fast and Slow.As law students , we are always told that we need to be commercially aware and this book is a great place to start! Christopher Stokes has been a partner in a City firm, marketing director and financial journalist and therefore has the knowledge of what working in the business world is like. It covers a broad range of topics including equity finance, debt finance, M&A, private equity and banking. It’s a great place to start if you wish to know about the financial markets in an understandable manner through the use of concepts being defined simply and with examples. It is a great little introductory handbook giving you the knowledge you need in a digestible form. Christopher also has a range of other books that may help you with commercial awareness , such as ; All You Need To Know About Commercial Awareness. The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken But it’s not just about cuts. It’s also about failing to design the justice system around women’s unpaid work. Little attention is given, writes Kennedy, to things like scheduling probation appointments during school hours, and research has revealed that “women’s childcare responsibilities are impacting on their ability to comply with their community sentences”. And women who fail to comply often end up in prison – “even where the original offence would never have merited a custodial sentence”.

Zhong, Lena Y.; Dai, Mengliang (2019). "The Politics of Wrongful Convictions in China". Journal of Contemporary China. 28 (116): 260–276. doi: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1511396. S2CID 158537048. Jed S. Rakoff, "Jailed by Bad Science", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 20 (19 December 2019), pp.79–80, 85. According to Judge Rakoff (p.85), "forensic techniques that in their origin were simply viewed as aids to police investigations have taken on an importance in the criminal justice system that they frequently cannot support. Their results are portrayed... as possessing a degree of validity and reliability that they simply do not have." Rakoff commends (p.85) the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommendation to "creat[e] an independent National Institute of Forensic Science to do the basic testing and promulgate the basic standards that would make forensic science much more genuinely scientific." Garrett, Brandon L.; Neufeld, Peter J. (2009). "Invalid Forensic Science Testimony and Wrongful Convictions". Virginia Law Review. 95 (1): 1–97. ISSN 0042-6601. JSTOR 25475240. GOULD, JON B.; LEO, RICHARD A. (2010). "One Hundred Years Later: Wrongful Convictions After a Century of Research". The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 100 (3): 825–868. ISSN 0091-4169. JSTOR 25766110.Another study estimated that up to 10,000 people may be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes in the United States each year. [12] According to Professor Boaz Sangero of the College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan, most wrongful convictions in Israel relate to less serious crimes than major felonies such as rape and murder, as judicial systems are less careful in dealing with those cases. [13] Contributing factors [ edit ]