What if preventing wrongful convictions starts with peacemaking?

Most explanations of wrongful convictions point to failures of evidence: a mistaken eyewitness, a false confession, faulty forensic science, a false accusation, an overstretched defence lawyer, or investigators who lock onto a theory and never let go. Each of these matters. But beneath many of them sits something more basic: the way the justice system approaches conflict itself.

The criminal justice system is adversarial by design. Two sides compete, challenge one another’s accounts and ultimately try to persuade a court. Adversarial safeguards are essential to a fair trial. But what happens when the same win-or-lose mentality enters the search for truth?

Peacemaking criminology offers a different starting point. Rather than relying on coercion to respond to conflict, it looks toward nonviolence, compassion, understanding and more peaceful ways of pursuing justice. Restorative justice puts some of these principles into practice through dialogue, participation and efforts to repair harm. Those ideas can sound a long way from the machinery of criminal investigation. Yet research suggests that some of these principles might be more important than we assume.

How we ask matters

Consider how suspects are questioned. A 2024 systematic review examined research comparing accusatorial, information-gathering and direct-questioning approaches. Accusatorial interrogation begins from suspicion of guilt and can use pressure, confrontation or evidence ploys to overcome denials. Information-gathering interviewing, by contrast, emphasizes rapport, open-ended questions and obtaining an account.

The difference matters. Accusatorial methods were associated with roughly three times the odds of a false confession compared with direct questioning and more than four times the odds compared with information-gathering approaches. Information-gathering methods also produced significantly more true confessions than direct questioning. Put simply, how investigators seek the truth can affect whether they get the truth.

The lesson points away from domination and toward principles that also sit at the heart of peacemaking: respect, listening, rapport and communication aimed at understanding rather than victory.

This idea extends beyond the interrogation room. Research on procedural justice identifies four principles that shape fair interactions with police: giving people a voice, neutrality in decision-making, trustworthy motives, and treatment with dignity and respect. These are not simply ideals about being nicer to people. They are evidence-based principles for how authorities can exercise power without sacrificing fairness, trust or cooperation.

When the state is the offender

A second strand of research looks at what happens after a wrongful conviction. One study examined campaigns run by wrongfully convicted people and their families through the lens of restorative justice, drawing on interviews with 37 people connected to justice campaigns, including victims of wrongful convictions, family members, campaigning organizations, lawyers, journalists and an academic.

The study set out to identify what causes miscarriages of justice and what makes campaigns against them succeed. But another theme emerged: how closely these campaigns resemble restorative justice. They share many of its hallmarks, including victim participation, dialogue, acknowledgment of harm, reparation and a focus on what happens next.

There is a catch. Restorative justice depends on a relationship between victim and offender. In wrongful conviction cases, the “offender” may effectively be the state or its institutions, and those institutions are often reluctant to acknowledge failure. Without acknowledgment, meaningful dialogue and repair become difficult. Campaigns may therefore become one of the few mechanisms available to force institutions to confront what went wrong.

This matters for prevention too. A justice system that cannot openly examine its mistakes risks reproducing them. Peacemaking is therefore not only about how authorities treat people before a conviction. Its principles of accountability, dialogue and acknowledgment also matter when the system itself causes harm.

Treating conflict as a question, not a battle

Wrongful convictions can begin when investigators commit to a suspect early and then interpret new evidence through that theory. Once the task becomes proving that a particular person committed the crime, contradictory evidence can start to look like an obstacle rather than information.

Peacemaking suggests a different orientation: listen before judging, seek understanding rather than admission, allow competing accounts to be heard and treat disagreement as something to investigate rather than something one side must defeat.

This does not mean replacing criminal investigation with restorative justice. Nor does it mean abandoning adversarial protections at trial. Peacemaking will not eliminate wrongful convictions, and rigorous investigation, reliable forensic science, disclosure obligations and strong legal safeguards remain essential.

But preventing wrongful convictions may require more than improving the evidence we collect. It may also require changing the relationships through which that evidence is gathered, interpreted and challenged.

If confrontation can make false confessions more likely, if listening can produce better information, and if institutional defensiveness makes it harder to confront miscarriages of justice, then peacemaking is not peripheral to the problem of wrongful conviction. It may be one part of preventing it.

Sometimes the best way to find the truth is to stop treating every encounter as a battle.

Lisa Monchalin, Ph.D., J.D., is the Director of the Applied Justice Lab and teaches in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Nadine Pluzak, MSW candidate, is Research Manager at the Applied Justice Lab and is completing a Master of Social Work at the University of Victoria.