Foreword.

• Author: Acker, James R.

The criminal law would be enforced reliably, equitably, and proportionately against offenders, and only offenders, in a perfectly just and error-free world. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world. Gaps are inevitable, and slippage foreordained between abstractions and their manifestations in all human endeavors. Innocent people are wrongly accused, convicted, and imprisoned in American systems of criminal justice. Guilty parties escape detection, verdicts fail to speak the truth, and punishments do not match the crimes. Justice sometimes miscarries.

The Albany Law Review and the University at Albany School of Criminal Justice have entered into a unique partnership devoted to analyzing, in an annual special issue of the Albany Law Review, the legal, empirical, systemic, and human dimensions of miscarriages of criminal justice. This distinctive collaboration involves separate institutions with different academic strengths and missions. Albany Law School, the oldest independent law school in North America and home to the Albany Law Review, prepares students for entry into the legal profession. It promotes and relies on scholarship grounded primarily in legal doctrine and policy analysis. The University at Albany, a research center within the State University of New York ("SUNY") system, houses a School of Criminal Justice with the oldest and one of the leading Ph.D. programs of its kind. Its focus is on studying the causes of crime, and the operation of the law enforcement and judicial and correctional institutions that comprise criminal justice systems. Its methods are primarily social scientific and empirical.

The seeds of this venture lay in the joint recognition that miscarriages of justice neither originate nor reside exclusively within law or criminal justice, but rather implicate both disciplines as well as others. Discussions began, (1) planning ensued, and the inter-institutional initiative took root with a symposium hosted in March 2010 by the Albany Law Review: Wrongful Convictions: Understanding and Addressing Criminal Injustice. The symposium, moderated by Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman of the New York Court of Appeals, involved the participation of legal scholars, empirical researchers, policy activists, and practitioners, whose contributions subsequently were published by the Albany Law Review. (2) The partnership blossomed with the awareness that many additional issues remained unexplored and would benefit from the...