The last thirty years have seen an enormous increase not only in the exonerations of
innocent defendants but also academic scholarship on erroneous convictions. This literature has
identified a number of common factors that appear frequently in erroneous conviction cases,
including forensic error, prosecutorial misconduct, false confessions, and eyewitness
misidentification. However, without a comparison or control group of cases, researchers risk
labeling these factors as “causes” of erroneous convictions when they may be merely correlates.
In fact, the only way to establish what causes an erroneous conviction is to understand which
factors are exclusive to erroneous convictions as against other sets of cases.