Without a reliable count, does Australia have a wrongful convictions problem? It’s time for serious finding out

A problem left uncounted

In Australia, wrongful convictions are those identified as wrong after all appeal rights have ended. The authors say the country does not count such cases, so it cannot establish how often they occur.

They caution against using United States figures to determine Australia’s rate, given differences between the countries’ justice systems and cultures. But they argue that without an active inquiry, any Australian problem will remain hidden.

Lessons from overseas

Since the early 1990s, more than 600 people in the United States have been exonerated after DNA testing of retained biological evidence. They spent an average of 13.5 years in jail, and later reviews identified failures that contributed to their convictions.

From 1997 to September 2025, the UK commission referred 859 cases to appeal courts, which quashed 603 convictions. The article reports an acquittal rate of 70% for those cases.

Estimates point to uncertainty

Using UK figures and adjusting for national and prison populations, the authors estimate that an Australian review commission might confirm about eight or nine wrongful convictions each year after appeals were exhausted. Academic Rachel Dioso-Villa’s repository recorded 48 wrongful convictions from 1997 to 2015, based on court reports and newspaper coverage. She acknowledged that the count was likely incomplete. The authors also cite a 2014 estimate that nearly 300 people may then have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned in Australia.

A call for a review body

The authors say the evidence supports concern, while acknowledging that the present number of wrongfully convicted people in Australian prisons is unknown. They argue that the burden should shift to authorities to show that the problem is not occurring. They call for a national criminal cases review commission, saying Australia lacks a system designed to identify wrongful convictions and act on them.