These are fascinating times for observers of the American criminal justice system, which is currently in the throes of important transformations. Reforms of police investigations are occurring at an unprecedented rate at the state and local levels, longstanding penal policies are being reversed, and six states have struck capital punishment from their books within the past six years. One likely cause for these changes is the pressure placed on the system by growing doubts about its capacity to produce factually accurate verdicts. This pressure emanates from the steady exposure of wrongful convictions, a breakdown of trust in various types of forensic evidence, and findings of inconsistent and biased administration of capital punishment.
The newly found sensitivity to the possibility of error in criminal verdicts does not in itself guarantee a reduction in the incidence of error. To bring about meaningful reforms, it is imperative to engage in two successive and interlinked inquiries, each of which is the subject of the program’s two panels.
First, designing legal reform requires gaining insight into the causes of the inaccuracies. As the frequent source of mistaken verdicts is human error, it would be sensible to examine the experimental psychological research that illuminates human performance in the tasks performed in the course of the criminal justice process. This examination is particularly important as much of the human error observed in cases that went awry were actually caused or exacerbated by the procedures used by the police and the courts. For this program, we will focus primarily on the investigative process. The importance of reforming the criminal investigation cannot be overstated: that is where the mistakes get made and perpetuated. Experience shows that it is much harder to correct mistakes when they get to court than it is to prevent them ahead of time. Examining the causes of human error in criminal investigations is the goal of our first panel. This panel, entitled Cutting Edge Psychological Research, will present the most recent and psychological research that bears on the accuracy of the evidence presented in the criminal justice process. The research will be delivered by three prominent legal-psychological researchers, each discussing the four key field of legal- psychological research.
The second panel, entitled Applying the Research Towards Reforming the Criminal Justice Process, will consist of a roundtable discussion among prominent scholars of criminal law and evidence law who specialize in implementing social science research into public policy. The members of this roundtable will not present papers discussing their own research. Rather, their task will be to engage in a discussion geared at assessing the psychological research presented in the first panel and suggesting ways to convert that research into desirable and workable public policy. This panel will include a range of opinions, notably by the inclusion of former prosecutors.