The increase in cases in the criminal justice system is one of the reasons that the quality of the process that criminal defendants are expected to receive has decreased. As such, for decades, the quality and quantity of evidence that is considered enough to convict a person of a serious crime has decreased. Recently, study of the limitations of some of this evidence has caused police and prosecutors to improve the quality of the process of collecting, analyzing and presenting evidence. But a vast amount of work remains to be done before the criminal justice system demands a significant amount of high quality evidence to convict a person of a serious crime. Meanwhile thousands of people around the country are serving out very long prison sentences based on evidence that research shows is inaccurate and unreliable. The shoddy evidence practices on which we have unquestioningly based far too many convictions to date, includes:
