Book Review: Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do to Safeguard Justice

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do to Safeguard Justice. By Kent Roach. Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2023. xxxvii, 359 p. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 9781668023662 (hardcover) $34.99; ISBN 9781668023679 (softcover) $24.99; ISBN 9781668023686 (eBook) $24.99.

Reviewed by Leslie Taylor
Research and Instruction Librarian
Lederman Law Library
Queen’s University

Imagine being accused and convicted of a crime you did not commit. This is something that few of us want to contemplate, and yet an untold number Canadians undergo this horrific experience every year. While the Canadian public may be aware of a handful of high-profile wrongful conviction cases, most cases receive little public attention.

In Wrongfully Convicted, renowned legal scholar and lawyer Kent Roach explains that wrongful convictions are an inevitable product of flaws found in both human nature and the Canadian criminal justice system and that, while it may be easier to make corrections to the latter than the former, we must examine and address both where possible. Roach takes an in-depth look at the reasons why wrongful convictions occur in Canada and proposes measures to address these. He also urges the Government of Canada to identify and correct wrongful convictions more quickly and humanely, pointing to the 2021 Miscarriages of Justice report by the Hon. Harry LaForme and the Hon. Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré as a roadmap for achieving this.

Roach categorizes wrongful convictions into three types: (1) false guilty pleas, (2) imagined crimes, and (3) wrong perpetrator convictions. In Part One, Guilty Pleas, Roach explores the reasons why an innocent person might plead guilty to a crime they did not commit. While acknowledging a variety of distinct factors that can contribute to a false guilty plea, Roach points to mandatory minimum sentences and a justice system that too readily accepts guilty pleas in exchange for lesser sentences as key drivers of this problem. For example, Roach examines cases of caregivers who falsely pled guilty to infanticide. In many of these cases, the accused were from marginalized groups and evidence given against them by an expert witness was only later discredited. The defendants believed that the judge or jury would prefer the expert’s evidence over their own, and they feared receiving a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder. As a result, they made the decision to plead guilty to the lesser offence of infanticide, which does not carry a minimum sentence, even though they were innocent.

In Part Two, Imagined Crimes, Roach delves into the reasons innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes that did not happen. The main culprit for this type of wrongful conviction, Roach explains, is a mental phenomenon called “thinking dirty,” in which an agent of the criminal justice system allows stereotypes, generalizations, and other mental shortcuts to lead them toward mistaken conclusions. Cases brought against young mothers, racialized caregivers, people on welfare, and Indigenous persons are provided as examples where unconscious bias and dirty thinking has led to a conviction for a crime that did not happen. “Thinking dirty” may be a natural human tendency that can turn an accident into a crime, but various actors in the criminal justice system are supposed to function as checks on one another to prevent this from happening. However, thinking dirty is also contagious, and one person’s dirty thinking can influence the thinking of others, causing a so-called “snowball effect.” Roach gives many examples of how this snowball effect can play out. For example, when forensic pathologists conduct their autopsies in suspicious death cases with police present, the background information they receive from the police officers can influence the conclusions they reach.

In Part Three, Who Done It?, Roach explores “wrong perpetrator” convictions, the type where “police were right to think dirty but got the wrong person” (p. 139). According to Roach, these convictions originate from a type of cognitive bias called “tunnel vision,” where investigators focus on one suspect to the exclusion of others. He discusses famous examples of wrong perpetrator cases, such as David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin, as well as some lesser-known cases of wrongfully convicted Indigenous persons.

Roach explains that this tunnel vision comes from a natural human tendency to use mental shortcuts and to discount discordant information when faced with the challenge of solving a crime. However, he also argues that there are exacerbating factors within the criminal justice system that can be better controlled. He points to failures by police to coordinate information and make effective use of computerized case management systems, as well as the use of controversial investigation tactics such as jailhouse informants as key contributors to the problem.

In the final part of the book, What Must Be Done, Roach proposes changes to the criminal justice system aimed at reducing the number of wrongful convictions in Canada. Recognizing that it may be impossible to prevent wrongful convictions entirely, he urges the Government to correct those that do occur in a more efficient and humane fashion. To this end, he advocates for the passage of Bill C-40, the Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission Act (David and Joyce Milgaard’s Law), which, at the time Roach was writing this book, was making its way through Parliament. Bill C-40, which received Royal Assent on December 17, 2024, creates a new commission to investigate miscarriages of justice and implement a compensation scheme for the wrongfully convicted.

Wrongfully Convicted is not the first book on the topic of wrongful convictions in Canada, and many of Roach’s ideas build on those already identified in the existing literature. It does, however, contribute to the field by thoroughly cataloguing and examining not just well-known wrongful conviction cases but also ones that are hardly known at all, including those of Indigenous persons whose cases have previously gone unexamined. Roach’s book offers a new typology of wrongful conviction cases that may help in understanding the causes and solutions to this problem in Canada.

Everyone who works in the Canadian criminal justice system should read this book, and I would recommend that any law library that collects criminal law materials purchase it. I would also recommend this book to public libraries, as the issue of wrongful convictions is one that affects all members of the Canadian public.