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56 Crim. L.Q. 116 (2010)
An Offer You Can't Refuse: Pleading Guilty When Innocent

handle is hein.journals/clwqrty56 and id is 118 raw text is: An Offer You Can't Refuse: Pleading Guilty When Innocent Joan Brockman 1. Introduction As an increasing number of advocates and academics focus on wrongful convictions, a new light is being shone on pretrial procedures. Andrew Siegel refers to the examination of pretrial procedures for the sources of wrongful convictions as moving down the wedge of injustice . . . [to] a third generation of wrongful convictions scholarship and advocacy.' Siegel provides the example of how elected prosecutors in South Carolina have total control over the trial schedule, including when cases are called and which judges will hear the cases. The abuses are endless. One unintended side effect of giving prosecutors the power to decide which trials go ahead and which ones are adjourned is that defence counsel do not bother preparing until the last minute. Siegel refers to these pretrial procedures as deep structural feature[s] that operate - outside the ken of legal, let alone public observers - to warp the administration of criminal justice and produce wrongful convictions.2 More recently in Canada, experts have referred * B.A., M.A., LL.B., LL.M., professor, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C.; member of the Law Societies of Alberta and British Columbia. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the National Judicial Institute's Preventing Wrongful Convictions Conference, Victoria, B.C., March 6, 2009. 1 would like to thank Gregory Simmons for his helpful comments on this article. 1. Andrew M. Siegel, Moving Down the Wedge of Injustice: A Proposal for a Third Generation of Wrongful Conviction and Scholarship Advocacy (2005), 42 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1219 at p. 1223. According to Siegel, the first wave involved exonerations by modern science such as DNA evidence; the second wave was the realization that factors such as false confessions, eyewitness errors and faulty police identification procedures do result in wrongful convictions and that they can be fixed to some extent by the introduction of better procedures. 2. Ibid. 116