This study may best be thought of as a “history of the present.” This phrase, popularized by philosopher Michel Foucault and, more recently, sociologist David Garland,1 reflects a combination of historical narrative and social scientific inquiry and provides a useful tool for thinking about this study of the innocence movement. It differentiates the work from pure narrative history but also from much traditional social scientific research. I do not claim to have presented a fully comprehensive history of the modern criminal justice system or even of the innocence movement itself. Furthermore, this is a case study of a single movement and has little to say about the generalizability of its findings.
My goal was a history that is both narrative and analytic. This study traces many of the key actors, organizations, and events that were involved in the rise of the innocence movement in the United States. Constructing this narrative and filtering it through the lenses of social science allow us to better understand how this phenomenon came to be, why it has the characteristics it has, and its current state.
To that end, the approach taken in this study is a combination of historical and qualitative methods. This is fairly standard for social movement research, particularly case studies of individual movements, which are seldom defined by any one particular methodological approach or data source but rather a combination of methods that often includes “one or more qualitative approaches.”2 The data sources used here can be separated into three general categories: archival materials, qualitative interviews, and observational data.
Archival materials consisted of primary and secondary accounts of key events, people, and organizations. Again, the goal was not necessarily to be fully comprehensive—no historical account can make such a claim—but to collect enough information to develop a thorough understanding of each key element of the innocence movement I cover. The specific documents consulted are cited throughout the study, but I provide here a brief general discussion about the data sources.
One source of data was the National Death Penalty Archive, located on the campus of the University at Albany. The archive contains a variety of collections, but I focused on just a few that contained materials from prominent anti–death penalty activists and organizations. In particular, I viewed the collections from the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Catholics Against the Death Penalty, and the Steven Hawkins collection. Materials included pamphlets and other informational materials, internal memorandums, news reports, notes, and other documents.
For a key piece of legislation, the 2004 Innocence Protection Act, I constructed a legislative history by collecting documents from the Library of Congress’s online archive. These covered the years from the bill’s introduction in 2000 to its passage in 2004 and included bill drafts, congressional statements, and committee notes.
Additionally, I drew on legal documents, newspaper articles, and other published materials such as older academic publications. Court decisions were used for key cases discussed throughout. Newspaper reports were particularly useful for filling in details, gauging reactions to key cases and events, and gaining a sense of the broader discourse surrounding these developments. And finally, given that this study is in some ways designed to trace the history of an idea, older academic publications—particularly research published in the 1980s in both the hard and social sciences and articles written by key actors such as Scheck and Neufeld, for example—were treated as historical data rather than as simple literature-review materials.
The second major source of information came from semi-structured interviews with 37 people involved in innocence work; 17 interviews were conducted in person, 16 were conducted over the phone, and four involved both a phone call and an in-person meeting. While in-person interviews are generally best, due to resource constraints, they were not always possible. And while “it’s better to be there, . . . telephone interviews are the next best thing.”3 My telephone interviews still provided a wealth of information, and given that I was not asking about sensitive material, I do not believe that anything particularly significant was lost. Similar to oral history interviews, these conversations were aimed at generating “a robust or ‘thick’ description of a historical period or situation from the perspective of those who lived through that time.”4 Such interviews are particularly useful for understanding earlier periods of current movements such as the innocence movement.
Interviewees are listed in table A.1, along with their affiliations at the time of the interview. These individuals were chosen for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to ensure that I spoke with key individuals who were responsible for starting the movement. Without speaking to people from Centurion Ministries, the Innocence Project, and the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions, constructing a story of the movement would have been near-impossible, as they are largely responsible for its existence. However, I did not want to speak only with the movement founders and leaders but also with some who came into this area of work later or who are involved with smaller, less well-known organizations. Thus, I spoke with a number of other individuals who work for the three seminal organizations just named and also several who work with smaller innocence projects.
I did not want to speak solely with those who work within the innocence movement. I spoke to a few key scholars who conducted the early research into wrongful convictions and a couple of journalists who have been involved in wrongful conviction work. I also wanted to get the perspectives of people who have expressed hesitations, concerns, or criticisms of the innocence movement. While not many have been publicly outspoken against the movement, I was able to arrange interviews with two such people, law professor Abbe Smith and the Clatsop County, Oregon, district attorney Joshua Marquis. Finally, there was a slight snowballing element to the interviewee list. In a few instances, an interviewee would recommend that I speak with someone else, and in many cases, I did so.
| Table A.1. Interviewees (cont.) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Name | Position at time of interview | Formal interview date |
With two exceptions, interviews and meetings lasted anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.5 In most cases, I was able to digitally record my interviews with permission. All participants consented to the use of their real names.
I developed a separate list of questions for each of the interviewees depending on their role and when they became involved in innocence work. In general, however, questions fell into four topical domains. First, all were asked questions about their individual backgrounds (e.g., how they became involved in innocence work, what it was like when they did, why they do it). Second, those who work for specific organizations were asked about the organization and their role(s) within it. Third, depending on when they became involved, they were asked about different key events and what those events meant in the greater scheme of things. Finally, all were asked about their thoughts on the broader movement (e.g., innocence as a social movement, movement frames, prospects for the future).
While this structure provided a general flow to the interviews, the nature and ordering of questions varied. And the interviews were only semi-structured, allowing interviewees to expand on some topics and not others, highlight things they thought were important, and take the conversations in new directions.
In addition to personal interviews, I found several recorded and/or published interviews with movement actors, including Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Rob Warden. These interviews supplemented my own and together allowed me to get something of an “inside perspective” on the innocence movement, including the thoughts and motivations of those who are driving it forward.
In addition to my two main sources of data just described, I had several opportunities to visit with innocence organizations and attend events. First, I attended the national Innocence Network conferences in 2013, 2014, and 2016. This served a couple of purposes. First, it allowed me to meet a number of advocates and initiate contacts for interviews. But more importantly, it allowed me to see the innocence movement “in action.” Part of doing so is seeing very concrete things—what types of issues are discussed and how the conference is structured, for example—but there is also an element that is harder to define. Spending time around innocence advocates and exonerees allowed me to gain a sense of the movement’s vibe, for lack of a better word. Seeing how people interacted and having informal conversations with those involved provided an invaluable source of information that, while difficult to describe, contributed immensely to my thinking about the innocence movement.
I also made several visits to two key innocence organizations. I visited the Innocence Project’s office in New York twice. Seeing its headquarters and interacting with the employees and volunteers was immensely helpful. I also had a stroke of good fortune during my first visit in October 2013. During one of my interviews, an exoneree from Texas who happened to be in New York stopped by the office. A group of employees and students gathered in the conference room to speak with him, and they were kind enough to invite me into the room.
In addition to the Innocence Project, I spent an afternoon at the Centurion Ministries office in Princeton, New Jersey. I met staff members (and the office dog), was shown around the office, and had several informal conversations.
Kate Germond, Centurion’s director, also invited me to a very special event just a couple of weeks after my visit. One of the organization’s most generous donors was William Scheide. A collector of rare books, Bach scholar, and lover of classical music, Scheide and his wife held an event each year on his birthday and raised money for a local organization. Each year, he invited the staff and exonerees from Centurion to attend. Germond invited me to the events for Scheide’s 100th birthday celebration. Thus, I was able not only to attend a very special event but to spend a weekend with the staff and more than a dozen exonerees from Centurion Ministries.
Like my attendance at the Innocence Network conference, the benefits of my visits with Centurion and the Innocence Project are difficult to articulate. Undoubtedly, however, they contributed to my understanding of and thinking about the innocence movement.
Like any study, this one has its limitations. I will mention two major ones here.
First, while I described the early history (i.e., pre-1980s) of wrongful convictions in brief, the historical scope of my focus is limited to the past few decades. This is by design. I wanted to focus on the modern innocence movement and how it developed and thus focused on the time period during which the key players joined, organizations developed, and ideas emerged. This should not, however, be interpreted to mean that the earlier history is less important or less worthy of further study. In fact, a longer-term examination of wrongful convictions and of the idea of innocence in criminal justice and in U.S. culture more generally would be exceedingly valuable and might highlight the historical preconditions that allowed the narrative of my study to unfold.
Second, there are key limitations to my data. The archival sources are far from complete; the National Death Penalty Archive alone contains a significant amount of information that was not consulted, innocence organizations may have records that I was unable to view for this project, and countless other news reports speak of the people and events covered in this study.
Perhaps more importantly, my interview sample was relatively small and did not cover the full spectrum of individuals involved in innocence work, and those I did interview could certainly have been asked additional questions about a number of other topics. In attempting to examine the emergence and development of the movement, I focused largely on the people and organizations who were involved at the earliest stages (e.g., early journalists and scholars, Centurion Ministries, the Innocence Project, and the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions). As much of the early attention and action revolved around innocence and capital punishment, I also explored elements of the anti–death penalty movement (e.g., the Death Penalty Information Center). Regarding the current period, I focused mostly on Innocence Network organizations, as the Network is the structural backbone of the entire movement. However, I did not interview exonerees, their families, or others who have become involved in innocence advocacy to some degree (e.g., victims, practitioners). While this element is a vital part of the modern movement, and researchers should absolutely study this element of innocence advocacy, there were practical constraints to interviewing such individuals, and their participation is mostly recent and beyond the scope of this particular study. The movement largely grew out of the advocacy efforts of lawyers and investigators who were doing wrongful conviction work, and to that end, I aimed to provide a thorough narrative and analysis of those efforts and their results.
Still, these data limitations are noteworthy and valid critiques. I do not think, however, that they disrupt the basic validity of my narrative or my analytical interpretations. While I did not consult every possible source of information or interview every possible person, I made sure to speak with many of the key actors who were responsible for the growth of the innocence movement, including the founders of the movement, and with a decent variety of others involved in wrongful conviction advocacy through formal organizations, and the data I collected provide important and interesting information about the movement.
The foregoing critiques, of both the limited historical lens and of the data limitations, are important to consider when interpreting the narrative and analysis presented in this study. However, I think that both speak to issues about the scope and focus of this project. Garland points out that many studies aimed at understanding social life face “tension between broad generalization and the specification of empirical particulars.”6 Those that attempt to paint general pictures using broad strokes often miss specifics and details, some of which may not fit or clearly contradict the ideas presented; on the other hand, case studies emphasizing empirical specifics and historical details can lose sight of larger trends and patterns and fail to make connections that are historically and analytically important. I hope that this study walks this line and achieves some of both, but it certainly faces shortcomings from both sides. In some ways, it is very specific, focusing on individual stories that together make up a single, larger narrative; in other ways, it speaks to much larger issues, like the implications of civil rights discourse, how change happens, and what it means to be a social movement.
There are a number of specific ideas that do not receive the depth they warrant. Many issues brought up throughout the book are worthy of their own in-depth study. A few come immediately to mind. As noted earlier, I did not focus on exoneree advocacy, but such efforts seem to be more common now than ever before. A number of exonerees have founded their own organizations, including Witness to Innocence, Exonerated Nation, the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, and more. These are interesting and potentially powerful initiatives, but relatively few have been operating for more than a few years. Given the difficulties of sustaining a nonprofit organization in an expensive but underfunded area, it is too soon to fully examine the long-term success and impact of such organizations. However, scholars can and should explore these initiatives, and I am aware of several efforts to do so that are under way by talented researchers. Related to organizational efforts, the innocence movement provides a unique opportunity for research in that the entire population is relatively small and can be examined in terms of the organizational structures, tactics, resources, and more. Using innocence projects as the unit of analysis, scholars could devise and carry out interesting studies of the innocence movement. More emphasis could also be put on the cause-lawyering element of the innocence movement, as it is driven in large part by lawyers who are dedicated to changing the system.
Scholars might also focus on media. I have noted throughout that innocence has seemingly come to the forefront of debate and conversation, and one way to gauge such a development is in tracking coverage of wrongful convictions in media and popular culture. More extensive, systematic research on the media’s coverage of innocence would provide valuable information about the innocence movement. In addition, with the mainstream popularity of recent cultural phenomena like the podcast Serial and the Netflix series Making a Murderer, the public seems to be getting a glimpse into flaws in the justice system more than ever before. Again, the long-term impact of these ventures is unknown, but research can begin and continue to explore the effects of such media on public perceptions and opinions. Finally, a more public-policy-oriented approach to the study of the movement can be taken. Scholars can focus on examining specific reform efforts. Case studies could, for example, unpack the 2004 Justice for All Act in far greater detail to uncover the politics of reform. On the other hand, studies can examine patterns and identify factors that influence reform, or the lack thereof, at the state, county, or agency level.
This list is far from exhaustive. These (and many other) ideas and topics raised throughout this study are worthy of detailed research. Rather than focus on any one individual area, however, I aimed to cover a broad array of issues. This was done, in part, because the innocence movement has yet to be examined in great depth. Thus, I wanted to use the information gathered about a relatively small number of key people, organizations, and events to speak to larger themes about legal reform, movements, and social change. To that end, while the limitations of this particular study are quite real and ought to be acknowledged, I hope that by touching on a number of issues that are interesting and important, this work serves as a starting point, raising new questions for scholars (and advocates and critics, for that matter) and ultimately broadening the scope of research in the field. This might mean more studies of the innocence movement, of course, but also of other issues relating to miscarriages of justice.
I also hope that this study highlights some of the utility of using social movement research to think about change in criminal justice; in a system that seems to undergo major shifts every other decade or so, that seems so prone to flights of fancy, drawing on research about how change happens and how people mobilize is a useful way to think about how and why that evolution happens. And movement scholars can and should look to criminal justice and legal movements for examples that may be useful for building, refining, and ultimately testing their theoretical ideas.