Wrongful Convictions of African American Men

#justicesystem

African American men are number one in the United States for wrongful convictions, despite being only 13% of the country’s population. Many wrongful convictions involve prosecutorial error or Brady violations, which occur when evidence is withheld from the defense. Although wrongful convictions are caused due to several factors, prosecutorial involvement is one reason for false convictions.

There is substantial research on wrongful convictions and the causes; however, the scholarly community does not know prosecutors' perceptions of African American men’s wrongful convictions. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore eight prosecutors’ perceptions, decision-making strategies, and what these individuals believe can decrease wrongful convictions of African American men.

For this study, the generic qualitative approach was used to explore prosecutors’ perceptions of African American men's wrongful convictions. Interviews were conducted via phone and videoconferencing platforms such as Skype, Zoom, WebEx, and Google Hangouts. Email interviews were also an option. Manual hand-coding and NVivo software were used to analyze and organize the data.

The findings revealed that prosecutors believed cultural diversity training needs to be implemented to decrease wrongful convictions of African American men. Understanding prosecutors’ perceptions of wrongful convictions of African American men and what will decrease false convictions could promote positive social change by creating proper ethical training and resources to decrease prosecutorial error.

Wrongful convictions and exonerations have been known to the United States since the early 1900s (Bradley, 1993). Statistics show that one in three African American men will be incarcerated in jail, state, or federal prison at some point in their life (Mauer, 2011).

The Bureau of Justice Statistics provided substantiated evidence to indicate how massive the issue of wrongful convictions is in the United States (Carson, 2018). Rastogi et al. (2011) mentioned how vital race is when it comes to wrongful convictions. Although African Americans only represent 13% of the U.S. population, these individuals are number one on the list for wrongful convictions (Rastogi et al., 2011; U.S. Census Bureau, 2016).

Gross et al. (2017) also mentioned the significant difference in wrongful convictions of African American men as opposed to European American men. Understanding prosecutors’ perceptions are important to understand what these individuals believe has contributed to the increase in wrongful convictions. (Levine & Wright, 2016).

While there is detailed information on prosecutors and their experiences with working everyday cases, the scholarly community lacks data on prosecutors’ perceptions of wrongful convictions of African American men, which occur every day in the United States. There is research on prosecutors and the amount of power they hold in the criminal justice system (Levenson, 2015). However, there is little information on prosecutors and their experiences with working in everyday cases (Levine & Wright, 2016). For full study click here!