Erle Stanley Gardner’s "Court of Last Resort" and the Pursuit of Wrongful Conviction in Cold War America

Since the first US case of post-conviction DNA exoneration in 1989, national advocacy organizations, spearheaded by the Innocence Project, have championed the cause of potentially innocent prisoners, raised public awareness, and promoted policy reform. These developments have been hailed as the dawn of a uniquely modern moral, legal and scientific order – an ‘innocence revolution.’ In this presentation I question this claim to historical singularity by exploring a prior forensic framework of innocence centered on Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Court of Last Resort.’ Today Gardner is remembered as the creator of Perry Mason, the intrepid attorney who successfully cleared underdogs caught ensnared in false criminal charges. In the late 1940s Gardner sought to replicate Mason’s fictional heroics by establishing his ‘Court’ as an expert board dedicated to investigating cases of wrongful conviction. In many respects, Gardner’s enterprise shares some essential structural features of our present innocence moment. Yet as I will argue Gardner’s project was profoundly influenced by the political, legal, cultural and scientific context of Cold War America, and this determined both the forensic techniques it deployed in the pursuit of innocence, and the criteria for selecting whose claim to innocence was worth pursuing.