Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent

From a recently-released report:

The Report is limited to misconduct by government officials that contributed to the false convictions of defendants who were later exonerated—misconduct that distorts the evidence used to determine guilt or innocence. Concretely, that means misconduct that produces unreliable, misleading or false evidence of guilt, or that conceals, distorts or undercuts true evidence of innocence.
[...]
"The Report describes many varieties of misconduct in investigations and prosecutions. Some are always deliberate, some are rarely or never deliberate, and some may or may not be deliberate. The Report organizes the myriad of types of misconduct into five general categories, roughly in the chronological order of a criminal case, from initial investigation to conviction: Witness Tampering; Misconduct in Interrogations of Suspects; Fabricating Evidence; Concealing Exculpatory Evidence; Misconduct at Trial.

"Most of the misconduct we discuss was committed by police officers and by prosecutors. We also report misconduct by forensic analysts in a minority of cases, mostly rapes and sexual assaults, and by child welfare workers in about a quarter of child sex abuse cases.

To download the report from the original source, see https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Government_Misco... or click the PDF below this posting.