Forensic Frameworks of Innocence

We live in an age of innocence consciousness. Exemplified by the US-based Innocence Project (a non-profit legal network that leverages DNA evidence to overturn cases of wrongful conviction), and dramatized in popular docuseries largely devised and delivered on Netflix’s global platform, the pursuit of innocence has emerged as a powerful feature of our times. For most observers this is the product of uniquely modern forces: principled critique criminal justice bias, media advocacy, and most importantly the declarative power of forensic genomics. The forensic framing of innocence, however, has a surprisingly rich and varied history. Taking examples from the heyday of the British Raj and of Cold War America, and the Netherlands in the early twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the panellists examine how innocence has been conceptualized and operationalized as a form of ‘situated knowledge,’ and ask questions about how claims to innocence are produced, circulated and validated, who gets to benefit from such claims, and what these claims tell us about the time and place in which they were made.