Johnny Cash - San Quentin

What is a Miscarriage of Justice?

A miscarriage of justice is primarily the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime that he or she did not commit. The term can also be applied to errors in the other direction – "errors of impunity" – and to civil cases, but those usages are rarer, though the occurrences appear to be much more common. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or "quash", a wrongful conviction, but this is often difficult to achieve. The most serious instances occur when a wrongful conviction is not overturned for several years, or until after the innocent person has been executed or died in jail.

"Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial. Wrongful convictions are frequently cited by death penalty opponents as cause to eliminate death penalties to avoid executing innocent persons. In recent years, DNA evidence has been used to clear many people falsely convicted.

Scandinavian languages have a word, the Norwegian variant of which is justismord, which is literally translated "justice murder". The term exists in several languages and was originally used for cases where the accused was convicted, executed, and later cleared after death. With capital punishment decreasing, the expression has acquired an extended meaning, namely any conviction of a person of a crime he/she did not commit. The retention of the term "murder" both demonstrates universal abhorrence against wrongful convictions and awareness of how destructive wrongful convictions are.

Causes of miscarriages of justice include:

* confirmation bias on the part of investigators
* withholding or destruction of evidence by police or prosecution
* fabrication of evidence
* biased editing of evidence
* poor identification by witnesses and/or victims
* overestimation/underestimation of the evidential value of expert testimony
* contaminated evidence
* faulty forensic tests
* false confessions due to police pressure or psychological weakness
* misdirection of a jury by a judge during trial
* perjured evidence by the real guilty party or their accomplices (frameup)
* perjured evidence by the supposed victim or their accomplices

Even when a wrongly-convicted person is not executed, spending years in prison often has an effect on the person and their family that is irreversible and substantial. The risk of miscarriage of justice is thereby also a reasonable argument against long sentences, like life sentence, and cruel sentence conditions.