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Objectives: Estimate the frequency of self-reported factual innocence in non-capital cases within a state population of prisoners. Methods: We conducted a survey of a population sample of state prisoners who were asked to anonymously report their involvement in the crimes for which they were most recently convicted. To assess the validity of verifiable responses, prisoner self-report data were compared to aggregate conviction and demographic information derived from administrative records. To assess the validity of unverifiable responses, we developed a non-parametric test to estimate the probability of false innocence claims. Results: We estimate that wrongful convictions occur in 6% of criminal convictions leading to imprisonment in an intake population of state prisoners. This estimate masks a considerable degree of conviction-specific variability ranging from a low of 2% in DUI convictions to a high of 40% in rape convictions. Implausible or false innocence claims are estimated to occur in 2% of cases. Conclusions: The present investigation demonstrates that survey methods can provide bounded estimates of factual innocence claims within a discrete and known population. The resulting estimates, the first to formally separate claims of legal and factual innocence and to incorporate a formal measure of response plausibility, suggest that prisoners themselves are very often willing to self-report the correctness of their convictions. At the same time, a considerable minority indicate that procedural weaknesses with the administration of justice occurred in their cases. And, a distinct minority, with considerable offense variation, maintain that they are completely innocent of the charges against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more innocents are exonerated and researchers learn more about the causes of wrongful convictions, criminal justice practices have been altered to reduce the number of erroneous convictions, although reforms have varied widely in scope and substance throughout the nation. In this article, we provide an analysis of state-level investigative reforms important to the production of wrongful convictions as of mid-2016. Specifically, we collect and describe reform efforts in three investigatory areas: eyewitness identification, forensics, and interrogations. We then discuss wrongful conviction reforms and the innocence movement more generally, focusing on the importance of continued research into wrongful convictions as a critical policy issue in criminal justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most characters in fantasy novels seem to be irresistibly drawn towards the world of magic, whether they can actually reach it or not. This paper deals with the special situations of Susan Pevensie in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and Petunia Dursley in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Having had contact with magic, these two women find the strength to renounce dreaming about a reality that has closed its doors to them and build a "normal" functional life for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the attentional bias between guilt and innocence in a concealed information test using a dot-probe task. The participants were 20 individuals in a guilty group, who were told they had committed a crime, 21 individuals in an innocent group, who were told they had not committed a crime, and 19 individuals in an informed-innocent group, who were told they had not committed a crime but who were given crime-relevant information. Participants in the guilty group were instructed to try to deceive the examiner so that their crime would not be detected, whereas those in the 2 innocent groups were told to be open and frank. The avoidance response of the guilty group was much stronger than that of the 2 innocent groups at an exposure duration of 1,250 ms. We also confirmed that a group not involved in a criminal act, but with crime-relevant information, could be distinguished effectively at an exposure duration of 1,250 ms. Thus, it is possible to distinguish between not only the guilty versus innocent group, but also the guilty group versus the innocent group with crime-related information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma survivors often lament that they have lost their innocence or lost their souls and that something vulnerable and whole about themselves has been 'broken' or annihilated. Yet when the psychotherapeutic relationship begins, and symbolic material from dreams and the transference emerges, discernible patterns become apparent, indicating that a core of innocence and vitality has not been totally lost or annihilated. On the contrary, it has been 'saved' by dissociation and its system of inner objects and their protective and/or persecutory narrative 'scripts' or 'schemas'. The dissociative system splits off a wounded, orphaned 'child' in the psyche and clinging to this 'child' is a penumbra of innocence that apparently must be preserved at all costs. Unfortunately the costs of preservation are high because such encapsulated innocence becomes malignant, and the inner world turns perverse and destructive. Only when the wounded, orphaned, and innocent part of the personality is allowed to suffer experience again - this time with the promise of a new outcome - can true healing of trauma occur. How to facilitate this authentic suffering in the face of powerful resistances thrown up by the 'system', will be the focus of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal and queer theoretic critics charge that the myth of “childhood innocence” perverts and propagates the unwarranted expansion of child pornography law, and mischaracterizes sources of and solutions to sexual violence. This article spells out these criticisms and synthesizes them with recent scholarship on the racialization of innocence. In thinking these literatures together, we are able to survey the complexities of “innocence” as a political idiom for the promotion of social and sexual welfare. I conclude with the reminder that no idiom – whether “innocence,” “harm,” or “agency” – is purified of normative judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a Black theologian and political activist, deeply committed to the cause of freedom, reconciliation and justice in South Africa, Allan Boesak has embraced the philosophy of Black consciousness as a legitimate moral-political foundation for the development of national unity. Boesak is of the view that post-apartheid South Africa is still deeply plagued by a racist legacy of moral-political "innocence". I explore the validity of Boesak's position from the perspective of his fundamental claim that the philosophy of Black Consciousness represents a legitimate framework for addressing the legacy of "innocence", construed by him as an epistemic condition that refuses to engage with the historical "truth" of race thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wrongful convictions threaten the norms of crime reporting by shifting the media focus away from crime toward notions of innocence and fallibility. The 1989 attack on a jogger in Central Park resulted in a well-publicized response from the New York criminal justice system that eventually led to the wrongful conviction of five innocent youths. This research investigates reporting surrounding the Central Park attack and how the media’s response altered over the past 25 years. It argues that the Central Park jogger case offers an insight into the development of narratives of wrongful conviction and offers a typology to better understand how cases of innocence develop in print media. By exploring this case in reference to concepts including public narrative, signal crime and mediated witness, this paper focuses on the reporting on the case within The New York Times. It argues the newspaper played an important role in the public’s perceptions of the five men as they evolve from the accused, the offenders, the punished, and finally, to become the wrongfully convicted. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the malleability of the media on public narratives, its readiness for violent crime and the lack of accountability in constructing public opinions that potentially damage the innocent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'It is necessary to a Prince to learn how not to be good'. This quotation from Machiavelli's The Prince has become the mantra of the standard dirty hands (DH) thesis. Despite its infamy, it features proudly in most conventional expositions of the dirty hands (DH) problem, including Michael Walzer's original analysis. In this paper, I wish to cast a doubt as to whether the standard conception of the problem of DH-the recognition that, in certain inescapable and tragic circumstances an innocent course of action is unfeasible-fully captures Machiavelli's message and its terrifying implications. In particular, I argue that the standard DH thesis is inadequately 'static': it conceives the conflict between ordinary morality and political morality as a stark, momentary and rare paradox of action-an anomaly disrupting the normality of harmony. As such it misconceives both the extent and the nature of the rupture between morality and politics. In this sense, the argument I shall advance does just involve an exercise in the history of political thought. Rather, I want to suggest that, by virtue of its failure to take Machiavelli's insights seriously, the standard DH thesis fails to live up to its purported capacity to capture the complexity and fragmentation of our moral cosmos and that, consequently, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled version of the idealism and monism it purports to reject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By tracing how Wang Baoqiang and Giulietta Masina configure the concept of innocence in four films - Fellini's Il Bidone/The Swindle (1955) versus Li Yang's Blind Shaft (2003), and Fellini's La Strada/The Road (1954) versus Feng Xiaogang's A World without Thieves (2004) - this article demonstrates that similar human conditions produce similar cinematic responses. The parallel elements here include bankrupt political systems (Maoist socialism and Mussolini's fascism) accompanied by economic prosperity and the advent of materialism, in which individuals attempt to regain a sense of self through the traditional values of their cultures, whether Confucianism in China or Christian humanism in Italy: the focus on innocence in both Chinese and Italian films has also attracted similar critical responses. This article touches on the relationship between the following responses and the analysis of the films: Italian Neorealism in contrast with Chinese documentary realism, nostalgia for home, Christian and Buddhist humanism, value judgment, post-socialism, consumerism, problems of ethics, populism, Nietzsche's concept of the innocence of becoming and Heidegger's conception of homeless. The article concludes by suggesting an examination of Daoism for a comprehensive understanding of the parallelled configuration of innocence, bridging the concepts of Nietzsche and Heidegger and heeding both senses of crisis and senses for hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on research exploring adult women’s engagement with narratives of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and identifies implications for both child and adult victims. As this research showed, any single story cannot accommodate all experiences. When that single story becomes dominant those whose experiences are not acknowledged are at risk of being silenced and left without a narrative framework to make sense of their experiences, which in turn risk being unrecognised as abuse by others. The article looks at contemporary understandings of CSA and argues for the need to move beyond a single damage narrative in which victims are constructed as sexually innocent, weak and passive and seen to be inevitably damaged by their experiences. The article argues for the need to separate wrongfulness from harm and (sexual) innocence from childhood. This would enable us to recognise sexual abuse in all sexually abused children, including those who do not conform to sexual innocence, and to recognise that CSA is wrong irrespective of psychological damage. In doing so, it is argued, we would all be better equipped to recognise sexual abuse and victims would be better able to tell their own stories which may, but may not, include psychological damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions associated with making both arguments at once. We theorise the split as ‘doing the möbius strip’, as both sides agree on the assumption that commercial and sexual choice is either present or absent for young women. In this way, they reframe the contradictions and inequalities that shape young women’s behaviours as a problem of propriety and decency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most studies of the media sexualisation of children debate focus on its significance in terms of discourses of sexuality and gender. This article makes observations about public meetings called to express concern about media sexualisation held in several Australian capital cities 2009–2010 to argue that media sexualisation is also meaningful in relation to discourses of nation. Drawing on the claim made by Valerie Walkerdine that concern with the eroticisation of girls is a defence against acknowledgement of difficult sexual desires and Gayle Rubin’s observation that concerns with children’s sexuality often carry other political agendas, this article argues that the concern with media sexualisation of children in the Australian context carries meaning about national identity and national virtue. It places the emergence of the discourse in the recent history of revelations about the systemic abuse of children by the state and the Christian churches throughout the 20th century and into this century, and argues that the media sexualisation discourse constitutes subjects who, via their investment in innocence, are exonerated from any culpability in this compromising national history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reconsiders the concept of innocence in relation to animated films for children, focusing particularly on Disney but additionally drawing on examples from other traditions. The author argues that the notion of innocence within these films is potentially double-edged, encompassing both actively transformative and more vulnerable, passive properties. Children's animation is not simply culturally conservative, however, but also rehearses other possibilities, often in a playful form. The article suggests that what children learn from Disney and other animated films is shaped in complex ways by responses to the quality of innocence with which such films are so often imbued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will argue that representations of ‘childhood innocence’ do not express a prior and pure essence, but rather produce such representations performatively, through the separation of the pure and natural from the impure and corrupting. Innocence can be understood as a discourse constructing a relationship between subjectivities and their essence, whilst at the same time effacing the signs of this process of construction. Beginning with an analysis of Frank Wedekind's Mine-Haha, it will be suggested that in modern societies discourses can be mobilised to serve to protect and cultivate some individuals, but that they also operate powerful mechanisms of social exclusion, stratification, and normalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Résumé: L’auteur, à travers son expérience professionnelle, fait part de ses réflexions sur la ű vérité psychiatrique Ƈ supposée éclairer le juge sur la ű vérité judiciaire Ƈ. Il discute cinq problèmes fondamentaux : l’impartialité de l’expert psychiatre, l’entretien d’expertise, l’irresponsabilité pénale de l’accusé pour troubles mentaux, la crédibilité de l’accusé, l’évaluation de la dangerosité future de l’accusé. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: L’expérience de la culpabilité est indissociable d’une représentation de l’innocence. Les communautés humaines développèrent des organisations multiples afin de conjurer l’irruption de la violence. Des formes symboliques furent élaborées tels les mythes et les religions avant que des procédures relevant de la rationalité pratique ne se structurent. Ainsi, l’éthique et le droit sont-ils contemporains de la philosophie grecque ancienne fondée sur le logos. En tant qu’expérience collective et individuelle, la culpabilité reste pour la philosophie un problème dont la complexité fut à l’origine abordée, dans le sens de la culture occidentale, par le mythe d’Œdipe. La tragédie de Sophocle pose d’emblée la question de la culpabilité sur le mode de la contradiction et de l’ambiguïté, Œdipe n’est ni innocent ni coupable. Un schème anthropologique traverse l’histoire selon l’axe Athènes/Jérusalem. La tradition biblique introduit la question du mal et de l’innocence perdue selon une dialectique où le bien et le mal sont les moments générateurs de la conscience coupable, sans disjonction possible. L’analyse philosophique aura à élucider le passage du mythos au logos et à montrer comment, là où se forme par l’ambivalence du symbole l’intériorisation d’une conscience, les discours éthiques et juridiques développeront une argumentation rationnelle constitutive du juste. Le questionnement philosophique met alors au jour des tensions irréductibles où la position indéterminée de l’innocence dans ses rapports à la culpabilité manifeste la dimension tragique de l’existence humaine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although addressing the needs of victims is increasingly proffered as the key rationale for transitional justice, serious critical discussion on the political and social construction of victimhood is only tentatively emerging in the field. Drawing from Anglo-American victimology, the first part of this paper suggests that victims of crime as a category are often perceived as the mirror opposite of perpetrators of crime. It suggests that such a perspective narrows the notion of victims’ rights or needs so they become intrinsically linked to the punishment of perpetrators; that victims and perpetrators are reified and distinct categories; and that ‘true’ victim status demands innocence. The second part of the paper takes these insights and applies them to the context of transitional justice. In particular, it questions the notion of ‘innocence’ as a prerequisite for victim recognition and explores the ways in which victims and perpetrators are not always easily identified as distinct categories in conflicted or transitional societies. The paper concludes that incorporating blame in the calibration of human suffering results in the morally corrosive language of a ‘hierarchy of victims’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a less deceptive variant of the false evidence ploy, interrogators often use the bluff tactic, whereby they pretend to have evidence to be tested without further claiming that it necessarily implicates the suspect. Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of the bluff on confession rates. Using the Kassin and Kiechel (Psychol Sci 7:125-128, ) computer crash paradigm, Experiment 1 indicated that bluffing increases false confessions comparable to the effect produced by the presentation of false evidence. Experiment 2 replicated the bluff effect and provided self-reports indicating that innocent participants saw the bluff as a promise of future exoneration which, paradoxically, made it easier to confess. Using a variant of the Russano et al. (Psychol Sci 16:481-486, ) cheating paradigm, Experiment 3 replicated the bluff effect on innocent suspects once again, though a ceiling effect was obtained in the guilty condition. Results suggest that the phenomenology of innocence can lead innocents to confess even in response to relatively benign interrogation tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In interview, Lucile Hadzihalilovic has spoken of a desire to enable the viewer to enter a physical world by playing on sound and sensorial perception. Much criticism of Innocence, Hadzihalilovic's dark, elliptical fable of schoolgirls and enchanted forests, endeavors to unravel such aesthetic choices in light of the film's ambiguous focus on the bodies of children. Drawing attention to formal and diegetic motifs of subtle movement and acquiescence precisely through sonic elements of the film, this paper will re-examine the troubling issue of capturing ‘innocence’ and the role sound plays in preventing the viewer from ever fully ‘possessing’ the children of the film. At the heart of Innocence, there is a tension between the sound of moving bodies and the aurality of an object: a recurrently chiming clock ushers in the spectral image of little girls dancing. Yet, while the ballet moves rehearsed by the girls exemplify the physiological definition of the kinaesthetic – the steady movement of limbs, joints and tendons – it is the creation of a kinetic environ symbolized not only by the clock, but through various human and elemental sounds (breathing, whispering, gushing water, footsteps across grass) which emphasizes the girls' bodies as kinaesthetic presence. Sound thus preserves the fragile, yet infinite nature of innocence itself. Through foregrounding the intricate journey of the attentive ear in Innocence, both a new dimension of Hadzihalilovic's ‘haunted’ materiality and its complex refiguring of physicality is brought into view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines two contrasting proposals for the reform of criminal appeals: the government's recent proposal that the guilty should no longer have their convictions quashed on ‘technicalities’; and calls by campaigners for the Court of Appeal to consider innocence rather than the ‘safety of the conviction,’ together with their associated attempts to establish Innocence Projects in the UK. Despite the rhetorical power of ‘innocence’ as a campaigning tool, it is contended that to import such a standard into the legal system would be retrogressive and counter-productive, both as a safeguard against wrongful convictions and in protecting the integrity of the system. In order to be meaningful, due process protections must apply to all. The government's proposals attack this principle directly; innocence campaigners risk unwittingly assisting their endeavours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, the discourse of innocence currently prevails as a major way of understanding children. This article argues that the strength of this discourse lies in its prevalence, its resistance to challenges and the ways in which it connects ideas of innocence and vulnerability. The moral quality of the discourse of innocence works in conjunction with the sacred status of the child, to produce childhood as a moral rhetoric. Children and childhood function to explain and legitimize any practice or opinion as right while removing the necessity to provide reasons: children are the reason. The article also considers how issues around childhood and morality are implicated in the generation of social concern with risks affecting children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is a quantitative analysis designed to compare two groups of factually innocent capital defendants: those who were exonerated and those who were executed. There are a total of 97 cases in the sample, including 81 exonerations and 16 executions. The primary objective of the authors is to identify factors that may predict case outcomes among capital defendants with strong claims of factual innocence. Through the use of a logistic regression model, the following variables were significant predictors of case outcome (exoneration vs. execution): allegations of perjury, multiple types of evidence, prior felony record, type of attorney at trial, and race of the defendant. These results point toward significant problems with the administration of capital punishment deriving primarily from the quality of the case record created at trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: L’auteur passe en revue les diverses communications présentées lors de cette réunion. Il conclut que l’évaluation psychiatrique judiciaire doit devenir davantage scientifique et que la psychiatrie légale doit obligatoirement être enseignée aux magistrats et aux psychiatres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: De nombreux facteurs psychiatriques, cognitifs et affectifs sont susceptibles de perturber gravement la qualité et la véracité des dépositions, des aveux, ainsi que l’attitude des justiciables et des témoins devant les enquêteurs et les magistrats. De même, les sentiments subjectifs d’innocence ou de culpabilité ne reflètent pas obligatoirement la réalité objective du comportement. La psychologie normale et pathologique de l’enquête judiciaire et du jugement doit être au centre des relations entre les magistrats et les professionnels de la santé mentale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]