Research project Claims of wrongful convictions and the post-conviction review remedy:

Persons who consider themselves wrongfully convicted following a final verdict have the right to request a re-examination of their convictions. This is a process that is a part of the post-conviction review remedy, which is the final legal safeguard in the criminal justice chain against wrongful convictions. The majority of wrongful conviction applications get rejected, but the few approved ones usually result in exonerations. In this PhD project, I am studying the review remedy primarily from access to justice perspectives, i.e., what sort of access barriers exist for convicted people who are claiming to be wrongfully convicted, where I am analysing and problematising the applications and the court’s decisions on those applications. In the studied context, the worst-case scenario is that complex legal framework, high approval threshold, and lack of legal assistance may result in potentially innocent persons remaining convicted of crimes they have not committed.