The Cost of Being Wrong

The American criminal justice system is built to reach decisions. It is far less prepared to reconsider them.

In The Cost of Being Wrong, Maureen Sofia Geisler examines what happens when procedure becomes a substitute for truth. Through wrongful convictions, mistaken identifications, false confessions, overstated forensic evidence, coercive plea bargains, pretrial punishment, and the machinery of finality, she shows how ordinary rules-and good-faith decisions-can still produce devastating errors.

This is not an argument that everyone convicted is innocent, or that every actor in the system proceeds in bad faith. It is a harder argument: a system can follow its rules and still get the answer wrong.