Secondary characters in narratives of wrongful conviction

Abstract

Research on wrongful convictions has focused mainly on the relationships and interactions among wrongfully-convicted persons and state actors, perpetuating an overly-simplistic understanding of the harms of wrongful conviction. In this article, I analyze narratives of wrongful conviction obtained through in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the U.S. to shift attention toward these stories’ “secondary characters”—those individuals who were neither the main protagonists nor the key antagonists in participants’ narratives, but who nonetheless significantly shaped how the men made sense of their experiences of harm and their journeys from victimhood to vindication. Drawing on research in narrative victimology, I argue that focusing on the secondary characters in wrongful conviction stories facilitates a more nuanced understanding of how the injustice of wrongful conviction is experienced and processed—one that avoids reproducing the binary logic of the criminal legal system, which too often reduces wrongful conviction cases to one-dimensional stories of innocent people versus the state.