A Study of Wrongful Convictions and Imprisonment in Sri Lanka and United States of America

Abstract

The conviction of a factually innocent person or conviction of an individual who did not make any crime can be defined as a wrongful conviction. The innocent persons are imprisoned due to wrongful convictions not even in Sri Lanka but in USA as well. This can be occurred due to eyewitness misidentification, forensic error, false confession, police and prosecutorial misconduct, failure of legal profession and judges. Therefore time has come to take necessary action to prevent such wrongful imprisonment and to produce real offenders to the court and to charge them accordingly for their criminal activities. Thus, this research study is focused to find out the possible reasons of wrongful convictions, to define the standard legal framework in Sri Lanka for the wrongful convictions, to evaluate the standard legal framework of the USA for wrongful convictions and to assess the lessons that can be learned from the USA to eliminate the wrongful convictions in Sri Lanka. The qualitative research method will be used for this research study. Under the qualitative research method data has been collected through primary and secondary sources. Primary sources consist of national laws of Sri Lanka and USA. In addition primary data has been gathered by interviewing some legal practitioners in the field of criminal law. Further secondary data has taken from published books, e-databases, e-journals, e-theses and e-books. In this research study, it is expected to find out a specific mechanism for the Sri Lankan legal framework from the USA legal mechanism to eliminate wrongful convictions in Sri Lanka.