Wrongful Convictions Are Set Right, but Few Fingers Get Pointed. By AL N FEUER N
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Wrongful Convictions Are Set Right, but Few Fingers Get Pointed.
By AL N FEUER New York Times AUG. 8, 2017
When the Brooldyu district attorney s office asked a judge last month to toss out the guilty verdict of a man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder, the prosecutors maldng the re uest did something they rarely do: They held someone res onsible for bungling the case.
It was July 12 and Mark Hale, the chief of the office’s Conviction Review Unit, announced in court that the wi'ou ed defendant, Jabbar Washin ton, had spent 20 years in prison because of grievous errors at his trial. But then, Mr. Hale went further, telling the judge that the prosecutor who had overseen the trial intentionally withheld evidence and coaxed a witness into giving testimony that was purposefully misleading.
There’s a lot of - perhaps blame is maybe the wi ong word - but responsibility that goes around on that, he said. It might seem like an obvious step for prosecutors seeldng to reverse a tainted conviction to declare in open court who in law enforcement had a role in compromising the case. But assigning blame, at least in public, doesn’t happen often even in troubled cases.
In the last three years, the Conviction Review Unit, or C.R.U., in Brooldyn has asked judges 23 times to free defendants who should not be in prison, maldng it by far the busiest and most effective unit of its land in New York State. But in only a handful of the cases have lawyers in the unit held anyone accountable.
Compare Mr. Washington’s court appearance with a much more typical proceeding, one for Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were freed in May 2014 after being locked up for decades in connection with the 1985 murder of a drug dealer. At that hearing, Mr. Hale told the court that the prosecution’s chief witness, a troubled diaig addict, was “so problematic that the fact-finding process of the jury ’ h d been “uudenniued. But he never fully explained how the witness passed muster with the police and prosecutors and was allowed to testify against the men at trial. By virtue of the C.R.U.’s mandate to re-exaruine cases from the past, most of the matters that it considers are decades old and emerged from an era when evidence from sur eillance cameras or DNA was far less common. Because such cases frequently relied or shaly witnesses whose memories may have faded over time or who may be dead it has been difficult for the unit to prove that detectives or prosecutors, worldng years ago, committed miscondirct.
And yet with a decisive Democratic primaiy election for Broolyn district attorney ap roaching in September, the question of who, if anyone, in the criminal justice system has paid a price for the numerous wrongful convictions in the borough has suddenly become a political issue.
Earlier this summer, Ama Dwimoh, one of six challengers seeldng to defeat Eric Gonzalez, the acting district attorney, called for a sweeping review of how Mr,
Gonzalez has handled bungled cases. And at the end of July, Ms. Dwimoh, who once worked in the district atto ey s office, accused her former employer of
never holding anyone accountable for the many botched convictions it has helped overturn.
Mr. Gonzalez has himself worked in the district attorney’s office for more than 20 years, though he has been in charge of it only since his predecessor, Ken Thompson, died of cancer in October. He pushed back last week, appearing in public with members of the borough’s congressional delegation, all of whom praised his work undoing wi ongful convictions.
The politicians noted that police officers and prosecutors enjoy immunity from criminal and civil liability for much of what they do in the courtroom and as law
enforcement agents. They also said that it was difficult to punish those who send people to prison wi ongly because even if misconduct is discovered, it is often too late to prosecute.
On at least two occasions, prosecutors in the district attorney’s office have left their jobs under a cloud from tainted cases before they could be reprimanded. Even so, sloppy police or trial work rarely rises to the level of a crime. And while experts agree that there should be a way to hold the police and prosecutors accountable for unethical behavior especially in the most egregious cases they are almost never prosecuted in Brool yn or anywhere else.
Complicating matters is the fact that most wrongful-conviction cases are sealed after defendants are released, meaning that the C.R.U.’s internal reports, laying
out in detail the findings of who may be responsible, are almost never made public. That leaves so-called exoneration hearings or occasionally, court papers - as the only public forums in which prosecutors are required to give their version of what went wrong.
Take the case of William Lopez, who served 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a man in a crack house before he was cleared by a federal judge in Brooldyn in Januaiy 2013. In his order freeing Mr. Lopez, the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, noted that the chief trial witness changed her account of the Idlling three times and eventually confessed that her testimony was a pure fabrication made under duress from the police and prosecutors.
Judge Garaufis also criticized Mr. Lopez’s lawyers and even the judge in the case, Carolyn E. Demarest, who, he said, made a string of bad decisions.
Judge Gara fis was scathing in his order, writing that the wrongdoing in Mr. Lopez s case ranged from an overzealous and deceitful trial prosecutor; to a series of indolent and ill-prepared defense attorneys; to a bewildering jury verdict; and to the incomprehensible Justice Demarest, who so regrettably failed time and time again.
And yet a year later, when the Brooklyn district attorney’s office filed a formal motion to dismiss the case, it held no one responsible, and the language that it used was bloodless. The district attorney’s office has recently conducted a thorough re-evaluation of the facts, the motion said. “As a result of that re-evaluation, the district attorney’s office has concluded that there is a sufficient possibility that Lopez is not guilty.”
Perhaps the best-known series of wrongful convictions in Brool yn involves the retired detective Louis Scarcella, who during the high-crime era of the 1980s and 90s was the New York Police Department’s go-to investigator for some of the hardest-to-solve murders in the borough. In 2013, prosecutors began an inquiry into more than 70 cases that Mr. Scarcella worked on and have since gone into court eight times to overturn the convictions of defendants whom he helped put away.
Last year, at an exoneration hearing for one of those defendants, Vanessa Gathers, the Conviction Review Unit noted that the only evidence against her at her manslaughter trial was a brief confession that she gave to Mr. Scarcella and then repeated to an assistant district attorney. But in describing the confession, the chief of the unit, Mr. Hale, used an oddly passive phrase: It was, he said, “an acquiescence to various scenarios that were put to her.
It was not the only time that Mr. Hale used accusatoiy words in describing Mr. Scarcella. At the hearing for Mr. Washington last month, he said that Mr. Scarcella had testified “improperly at Mr. Washington’s trial, leaving a misimpression about the only witness who identified him. And yet, since the start of its investigation, the district attorney’s office has maintained that Mr. Scarcella has never broken the law.
But detectives do not run criminal cases prosecutors do. And lawyers for the wrongfully convicted have questioned if, by investigating but refusing to condemn Mr. Scarcella, the district attorney’s office is trying to avoid a deeper examination of the role its own lawyers may have played.
“He pulled the trigger, he fired the bullets, the lawyer Ronald Kuby said of Mr. Scarcella while in court last month representing Mr. Washington. “But other people gave him the gun. They gave him the ammunition, and they didn’t much care who he hit.
It is no secret what ca ses wi ongfiil convictions. Eight years ago, the New York State Bar Association published a report determining that most occur after witnesses misidentify suspects or the police and prosecutors pressure people into testifying falsely or withhold important evidence from the defense. Some lawyers have described the process as a runaway train: When crime was high, police officers, under pressure, often strong-armed witnesses into identifying defendants; prosecutors were focused on securing convictions; and judges were reluctant to upend the trials of defendants who might be guilty.
Still, experts on wrongful convictions have suggested that accountability is best obtained not by punishing law enforcement agents for their mistakes, but rather by having them take part in analyses of what went wrong and training them to avoid similar errors in the future.
Under Mr. Thompson, the Brool yn district atto ey s office hired a retired state judge, Robert K. Holdman, to serve as an ethics officer providing guidance to prosecutors on questionable cases. And under Mr. Gonzalez, the office has increased its training on how to handle exculpatoiy evidence and avoid false confessions. It has also established a policy requiring prosecutors to seek approval from a supervisor if a case is based on only a single witness.
The accountability thing is often what stops people from embracing this process, said John Hollway, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who studies wrongful convictions. They think that accountability means punishment, b t it can also mean improving the system.
Using academic scholarly research, find an article that addresses an ethical dilemma from the past five years and annotate it thoroughly. What are the key points to the article? Summarize the dilemma. What are the key terms of the article? What conflicts or controversies does it raise? Where can you offer analysis or an original point of view? Once you have a handle on the article and your reaction to the issues it raises, use it as a foundation to
Create your own 2-4 paragraph "dilemma.”
Apply Kant’s Categorical Imperative to the problem you invent.
Apply any other method you have encountered in lecture material and the readings.
State which method you prefer and why.
Work with a partner collaboratively to share and divide this work for optimal results.
Your paper should be 3 pages. You MUST provide the source of the foundation dilemma, and thus this paper will require 1 reference using at least 1 correct in-text citation (indicating quoted or paraphrased material from the article and where to locate it). Use APA format in citing the source. Refer to course resources for details and help in achieving APA style.
Explanation / Answer
Considering the nature of qualitative studies, the interaction between researchers and participants can be ethically challenging for the former, as they are personally involved in different stages of the study. Therefore, formulation of specific ethical guidelines in this respect seems to be essential. The present paper aimed to discuss the necessity to develop explicit guidelines for conducting qualitative studies with regard to the researchers’ role. For this purpose, a literature review was carried out in domestic and international databases by related keywords.
Health care providers who carry out qualitative research have an immense responsibility. As there is no statistical analysis in qualitative studies, the researcher has to both evaluate what he or she observes and to interpret it. Providing researchers with the necessary skills and applying stringent supervision can lead to better extraction of reliable information from qualitative studies. This article presents a debate in order to illustrate how researchers could cover the ethical challenges of qualitative studies and provide applicable and trustworthy outcomes.
Researchers face ethical challenges in all stages of the study, from designing to reporting. These include anonymity, confidentiality, informed consent, researchers’ potential impact on the participants and vice versa. It seems of paramount importance that health care providers, educators, and clinicians be well informed of all the different aspects of their roles when acting as qualitative researchers. Hence, these adroit roles need to be well defined, and the use of practical guidelines and protocols in all stages of qualitative studies should be encouraged.
In the recent millennium, the constant trend of change in the demands of the community as well as transforming the trend of knowledge production has highlighted the necessity for researchers to adopt a more comprehensive approach. Increasingly, many academic disciplines are utilizing qualitative research (QR) as the qualitative method investigating the why and how of the process of a developed concept.
Qualitative research is sometimes defined as interpretive research, and as interpretations can be incorrect or biased, the findings may be controversial however, qualitative research is not only used as the first stage of quantitative research but can also play a key role in ‘validating’ it or in providing a different viewpoint on the same social phenomenaQualitative studies tend to use methods that result in text production rather than numerical outputs. Given that the researcher is considered to be the research instrument, and the plan of inquiry needs to be developed and altered as the study progresses, a qualitative researcher cannot depend upon traditional approaches to address certain concerns such as bias and credibility. Therefore, learning from a series of mistakes is often considered an integral part of qualitative research
In this study, a literature review was carried out in international electronic databases including PubMed, Web of Sciences, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Scopus, Ebsco, EMBASE and Science Direct without any time limitation, using the search terms “qualitative research”, “researchers’ role”, “ethical challenges” and “ethical guidelines”. These keywords were also searched on national electronic databases including Scientific Information Database (SID), Iran Medex and Medical Articles Library (Medlib) using the same strategy.
Authors of the present article endeavor to shine a light on the ethical issues affecting researchers and propose strategies to face the ethical challenges of qualitative studies, so as to provide applicable and trustworthy outcomes. This could be the basis for the formulation of specific ethical guidelines in this regard.
Ethical challenges in qualitative studies:
The researcher-participant relationship
The relationship and intimacy that is established between the researchers and participants in qualitative studies can raise a range of different ethical concerns, and qualitative researchers face dilemmas such as respect for privacy, establishment of honest and open interactions, and avoiding misrepresentationsEthically challenging situations may emerge if researchers have to deal with contradicting issues and choose between different methodological strategies in conflict arises. In such cases, disagreements among different components such as participants, researchers, researchers’ discipline, the funding body and the society may be inevitable some important ethical concerns that should be taken into account while carrying out qualitative research are: anonymity, confidentiality, and informed consent according to Richards and Schwartz’ findings the term ‘confidentiality’ conveys different meanings for healthcare practitioners and researchers. For healthcare practitioners, confidentiality means that no personal information is to be revealed except in certain situations. For researchers, however, the duty of confidentiality is less clear and involves elaboration of the form of outcome that might be expected from the studyThe researcher must endeavor to minimize the possibility of intrusion into the autonomy of study participants by all means. When highly sensitive issues are concerned, children and other vulnerable individuals should have access to an advocate who is present during initial phases of the study, and ideally, during data gathering sessions. It is sometimes even necessary that the researcher clarifies in writing which persons can have access to the initial data and how the data might be used informed consent has been recognized as an integral part of ethics in research carried out in different fields. For qualitative researchers, it is of the utmost importance to specify in advance which data will be collected and how they are to be the usedThe principle of informed consent stresses the researcher’s responsibility to completely inform participants of different aspects of the research incomprehensible language. Clarifications need to include the following issues: the nature of the study, the participants’ potential role, the identity of the researcher and the financing body, the objective of the research, and how the results will be published and used informed consent naturally requires ongoing negotiation of the terms of agreement as the study progresses Many people consider it necessary to participate in research that their peers, community and/or society may benefit from. Therefore, qualitative health researchers need to clarify that the research they carry out will benefit science and can contribute to the improvement of health policy
Research design
The qualitative method is utilized to explain, clarify and elaborate the meanings of different aspects of the human life experience. Therefore, researchers can interpret people’s experiences because they are involved in human activities. The principle of ‘no harm’ to participants ought to be considered by researchers, who should be aware of the potential harms that might be inflicted upon study subjects. Obviously, sometimes a conflict between the right to know (defended on the basis of benefits to the society) and the right of privacy (advocated based on the rights of the individual) may happen There are several effective strategies to protect personal information, for instance, secure data storage methods, removal of identifier components, biographical details amendments and pseudonyms (applicable to names of individuals, places, and organizations)Researchers have the responsibility of protecting all participants in a study from potentially harmful consequences that might affect them as a result of their participation. It is getting increasingly common for research ethics committees to seek documented proof of consent in a written, signed, and ideally, witnessed form. Researchers can only do their best to protect their respondent’s identity and hold the information strictly confidential as there would be no guarantee for it otherwiseFurthermore, in investigations of sensitive topics where written consent puts the informants at risk, audio recorded oral consent would be more appropriate development of personal relationships with participants may be inevitable while collecting certain data. Therefore, researchers should seriously consider the potential impact they may have on the participants and vice versa, and details of such interactions should be clearly mentioned in research proposals Overall, the role of the researcher as (a) stranger, (b) visitor, (c) initiator, (d) insider-expert or other should be well defined and explained As Brenner quoted Kvale state that, preparing an ethical protocol can cover issues in a qualitative research project from planning through reporting.
Data gathering and data analysis
In qualitative research, data are collected with a focus on multifaceted interviews and narratives to produce a description of the experiences. The researchers, therefore, play the role of a mediator between the experiences of the respondents and the community of concerned people The post-interview comment sheet could assist the researcher to note the feelings of informants, as well as interpretations and comments that occurred during the interview.
Data collection needs to be as overt as possible, and findings should be recorded. Although there is no guarantee of absolute confidentiality, openly recording field notes assists participants to decide what they wish to have on the record. In .health care research, the problem may be even more exaggerated as the researcher is sometimes the health provider as well.
In comparison with other research methods, ethnography has singular characteristics. When a researcher aims to study the culture of certain people, living amongst them is inevitable. This method of collecting data is a subject of debate from an ethical point of view. Long presence of the researcher amongst people of a particular culture necessitates informed consent. Participants should always be aware of the information that has been obtained and is being recorded, and consent to it. Sometimes this cannot be achieved easily and conflicts may happen, as in studies of cultural and ethnic characteristics.
The physical presence of the researchers within the culture requires them to be responsible for their role and potential consequences on the field. For instance, when criminals or a group of war veterans suffering from a disease are the subjects of a study, the risks involved in living amongst them should be considered. Ethnographers must be vigilant about any distractions stemming from close interactions that can be potentially harmful to participants in the long run Researchers can benefit from supervision sessions directed at learning, mentoring and skill development, all of which can foster their ability to carry out research without risking their health. Adequate professional supervision (which may be outside of the university) can be of service to researchers in dealing with the potential stress associated with the study.
In order to gain explicit data, ethnographers need to know the role of instrument details. There are eleven steps defined in ethnography which are meant to assist researchers. These steps include participant observation, ethnographic record, descriptive observation, taxonomic analysis, selected observation, componential analysis, discovering the cultural theme, cultural inventory, and finally writing ethnography.
Researchers should always be aware of the precise reason for involvement in a study in order to prevent undesirable personal issues. The probability of exposure to vicarious trauma as a result of the interviews needs to be evaluated. Interviewers should be properly scheduled to provide the researcher with sufficient recovery time and reduce the risk of emotional exhaustion while allowing ample time for analysis of the objective and emotional aspects of the research. It is also necessary for the researcher to be familiar with signs of extreme fatigue and be prepared to take necessary measures before too much harm is done.
Conclusion
In qualitative studies, researchers have a great responsibility and play many different roles. It is argued that qualitative research that deals with sensitive topics in depth can pose emotional and other risks to both participants and researchers. Clear protocols for dealing with distress should be in place so that both parties involved in research can use them if necessary. It is not usually easy to predict what topics are likely to lead to distress, and researchers should, therefore, receive sufficient training in predicting traumatic situations.
Preventive measures for researchers who carry out sensitive qualitative studies should include official arrangements for a peer support program consisting of a list of researchers who are involved, or a constellation of researcher support activities aiming at improving psychological fitness in the form of a professional confidence building module. Other such measures include offering adequate supervision to provide opportunities for self-development and self-care and facilitating the process of self-reflection and self-monitoring.
Strategies for emotional distancing need to be considered and adopted if the research topic or participants have the potential to be emotionally challenging. An appropriate planning should be in place before the commencement of the fieldwork, and it must be perfectly clear how the study should be conducted and what level of relationship development is necessary. Measures must also be taken so that levels of self-disclosure, objective displays of emotion during the interviews, and strategies to end the relationships are well defined and communicated.
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