Examining Official Misconduct Laws Through the Lens of Wrongful Conviction

Over the last 40 years, research and advocacy around wrongful convictions has accelerated and, in turn, produced more widespread awareness on the contributors to system errors. Specifically, exoneration data dating to 1989 point to increased discoveries of official misconduct in convictions of the innocent. Prior research shows who commits official misconduct and the acts in which they engage, but gaps between wrongful convictions scholarship and law persist. In this paper, I conducted a content analysis of criminal official misconduct statutes in 20 U.S. jurisdictions. I examined how acts, perpetrators, and sanctions are characterized in law, aiming to provide researchers with a legal framework for contextualizing official misconduct in wrongful convictions. The study's findings demonstrate how the relationship between law and scholarship can be mutually informative for addressing system errors. Particularly, I discuss how a legal framework can help scholars and legal officials understand the nuances of misconduct and, in turn, develop a more concrete interpretation of particular acts and perpetrators. I conclude by addressing the importance of these results for future works on official misconduct as a contributor to miscarriages of justice.