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33 J. Contemp. Crim. Just. 4 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/jccj33 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 2017, Vol. 33(I) 4-7 W rongful Convictions and © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: the Innocence Movement sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1043986216673007 journals.sagepub.com/home/cc OSAGE Little more than a decade ago, a Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice special issue, devoted to Miscarriages of Justice, was edited by capital punishment scholar Robert Bohm (2005). Bohm noted that the subject had not received much scholarly attention from social scientists and especially criminologists. Articles in the issue shed light on a theory ofprosecutorial misconduct (Schoenfeld, 2005), on wrongful convictions in Canada (Denov & Campbell, 2005), and on restorative justice and wrongful capital convictions (Barnett, 2005). But the article that illu- minated the history and morphology of wrongful conviction scholarship, helped define the contours of an academic specialty, and laid down a challenge to the crime disciplines was Richard Leo's (2005) Rethinking the Study of Miscarriages of Justice: Developing a Criminology of Wrongful Conviction. His lead article took criminologists to task for not engaging in wrongful conviction research at a time that psychological and legal studies focusing on actual innocence were bur- geoning, while explaining the daunting obstacles in gathering wrongful conviction data for social scientific analysis. Leo's article clarified a sprawling subject for all readers. It goaded scholars already analyzing issues related to wrongful convic- tions to redouble their efforts, and for some criminal justice scholars and crimi- nologists, including me, inspired them to study a field that was not entirely defined (Zalman, 2006). In the decade since that special issue was published, the subject of wrongful con- viction-as a group of academic sub-disciplines but more importantly as the locus of a wide range of criminal justice reforms-has continued to grow. This growth was not entirely undirected, for at the core of innocence policy innovation and advocacy lies the innocence movement-the subject of this special issue. The innocence movement's policy influence has been impressive. Since the mid- 1990s, new federal and state laws, and innovative police, prosecution, and forensic science programs-aimed at improving the accuracy of criminal conviction-have been enacted. Research to better understand wrongful convictions have been funded. A partial list of reforms include the following: * State laws giving inmates access to DNA evidence; * Federal grants assisting post-conviction DNA searches; * More states enacting exoneree compensation laws; * Increased compensation for wrongfully convicted federal prisoners, from US$5,000 to US$50,000;

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