Foreword.

• Author: Westervelt, Saundra D.

In the Foreword to the inaugural issue of the Albany Law Review's special series on Miscarriages of Justice, Professor James Acker begins, "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." (1) Quite true; no system of justice created and implemented by human hands is perfect. Mistakes are made. Abuses occur. In such cases, it is incumbent upon those working within the system to ensure that those wrongs are righted--the innocent are freed, the truly guilty are pursued, the truth is revealed, and equity remains paramount. The quality of justice delivered by the American system of justice hinges as much on how it responds when justice miscarries as on its attempts to prevent such miscarriages from the outset.

Later in that same Foreword, Professor Acker outlines a vision for the law review's special series on miscarriages of justice, a vision that insists on a broad understanding of what constitutes such a miscarriage: "The focus on 'miscarriages of justice' is deliberately expansive. It encompasses wrongful convictions and their antecedents and consequences, erroneous acquittals and corresponding lapses in law enforcement and prosecution, disservices to the victims of crime, inequitable punishments, and related matters." (2) The focus of this special edition, Revealing the Impact & Aftermath of Miscarriages of Justice, expands this definition to include the system's reluctance to recognize and right the wrongs created when justice miscarries. Is it not also a miscarriage of justice to ignore the harms caused by the failures of the system and to compound those harms by an unwillingness to recognize and remedy its mistakes? In particular, the articles included in this special edition explore the aftermath of wrongful convictions for innocent people. As these authors have stated elsewhere, justice continues to miscarry for those wrongly convicted of crimes "when the state fails to assist their reintegration efforts and recognize its responsibility in their wrongful convictions." (3)

The focus on aftermath in this edition also is "deliberately expansive" (4) in both topic and method. Topics reveal a depth of examination of aftermath issues intended to prompt new lines of thinking and to go beyond a one-dimensional discussion of the obstacles that litter the path of those exonerated of crimes (though such research is quite important in its own right). These topics include the impact of a wrongful conviction on family...