Crimbrary

A "Holistic" Approach to Wrongful Convictions
"To set wrongful convictions right, appeals courts need to change the way they review evidence, according to Stephanie Roberts Hartung, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law.

In 'The Confluence of Factors Doctrine: A Holistic Approach to Wrongful Conviction,' Hartung argues that courts must adopt a holistic approach that accounts for the ways that errors in evidence-gathering often work in concert to obscure innocence.

"'Frequently, it is not a single misstep that causes a wrongful conviction, but rather a ‘confluence of factors,'” she wrote.

But historically, state and federal court’s piecemeal approach to addressing trial-level errors fails to account for the complex ways that seemingly independent errors interact with one another."