Racism and Wrongful Convictions
- Date
- January 23, 2025
- Time
- 12:00 PM EST - 1:30 PM EST
- Location
- POD-457 | Lunch will be provided
- Open To
- TMU Community
In the fourth of instalment of our speaker series, Prof. Kent Roach, Co-Founder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, will argue that the early American innocence movement downplayed racism and prejudice. In particular, he points to the association of Black men with sexual violence as key factors in many wrongful convictions that were later overturned by DNA evidence.
Prof. Roach will suggest that the discourse surrounding pre-DNA exonerations including that of Ed Johnson and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter addressed the role of racism more directly. According to Roach, the movement’s focus on issues like mistaken eyewitness identification rather than racism are connected to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp and the hostile environment represented by President Trump’s continual denial of the wrongful conviction of the exonerated Central Park Five.
In this talk, Prof. Roach will also explore the role of anti-Indigenous racism in the wrongful convictions of Indigenous men in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
Prof. Kent Roach is a Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and co-founder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions (external link, opens in new window) . He served as Research Director for both the Goudge Inquiry into forensic pathology and to the "A Miscarriages of Justice Commission" report (2021) authored by the Hon. Harry LaForme and Hon. Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré. His most recent book Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes and What Canada Must Do To Safeguard Justice was published by Simon and Schuster in 2023, with an expanded paperback published in early 2025. He is also working on Justice for Some: A Comparative Study of Miscarriages of Justice and Wrongful Convictions scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2026.