Historically, there has been considerable debate about the causes of wrongful convictions, in part because there was not full agreement about whether the defendants were truly innocent. To learn from cases of wrongful convictions, it is important to identify cases where there is now wide agreement that the persons are actually innocent. Here, the focus is on cases where people were exonerated based on post-conviction DNA tests.

Law enforcement can learn from what went wrong in these cases. Recently, Professor Brandon Garrett focused on confession statements obtained from suspects in police custody, all of whom were convicted and subsequently exonerated