Felaktigt dömda
Felaktigt dömda: Rapport från JK:s rättssäkerhetsprojekt is the 2006 report from the Chancellor of Justice’s first legal-certainty project. The local PDF is the official 502-page report.
The project manually identified serious criminal cases from 1950 onward because Sweden lacked usable statistics on reopening cases. It examined eleven convictions since 1990 in which the defendant had received at least three years’ imprisonment, obtained a new trial, and was then fully acquitted. Eight concerned sexual offences against children; the other three concerned homicide.
Findings
The report found defects in every examined investigation. Its recurring findings included leading or otherwise deficient interviews, incomplete case material, inadequate testing of complainant accounts, expert failures, speculative credibility reasoning, weak defence performance, and serious difficulty obtaining effective review after conviction.
The report says the original evaluation of evidence was wrong in all eleven cases, with reservations about two, and that no suspicion remained against any of the eight defendants in the sexual-offence cases after the renewed investigations and trials. It also found three cases in which grounds eventually accepted for reopening had already been presented in an earlier rejected application.
Evidentiary limits
This is a selected error sample, not a prevalence estimate for wrongful conviction. That limitation does not weaken its evidence about failure mechanisms: the report had access to complete case files, including unused investigative material, and traced how mutually reinforcing errors survived multiple institutions.
The report grounds Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases, False accusations as an epistemic risk, and the critique of unconstrained fact-finding in Free evaluation of evidence in Sweden.