Erased in Class & Blamed in Court: Curriculum Gaps & the Ties to Wrongful Conviction

By: Milica Tokic

Injustice doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is built over time through the stories we are told and the ones that are kept hidden. Curriculum gaps refer to the selective teaching of history and knowledge in schools, where overwhelmingly white narratives are centered while marginalized voices are either misrepresented or completely erased. Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities are overwhelmingly portrayed only through the lens of struggle, crime, or victimhood, if even acknowledged at all. This narrow framing not only distorts reality but also shapes how students, educators, and society as a whole come to view certain groups. Over time, these early biases bleed into the justice system, where assumptions rooted in incomplete education can influence who is seen as suspicious, who is believed, and who ends up wrongfully convicted. 

What are curriculum gaps?

Curriculum gaps go beyond what's excluded; they distort what’s included. In many schools, marginalized groups are represented through incomplete or tokenized narratives. Students might learn about Martin Luther King Jr., but not about Bayard Rustin, the openly gay Black man who organized the March on Washington. They may be taught about residential schools as a tragic chapter, but rarely about the ongoing strength, resistance, and cultural revival of Indigenous communities. These gaps send subtle yet very powerful messages; one being that some histories matter more than others. When systemic violence like slavery, colonization, or police brutality is stripped or entirely ignored, students absorb a twisted understanding of power dynamics and the injustice at play. This creates implicit bias that lingers far beyond the days of the classroom. For students from marginalized communities, this lack of representation can lead to feeling unseen, inferior, or disconnected from their history. 

Bias to blame: The pipeline

The biases formed through curriculum gaps don’t just stay in the classroom; they follow people into courtrooms. This pipeline demonstrates how institutional bias within the classroom doesn’t just end with graduation; it flows downstream into courtrooms and correctional institutions in a pattern where “harsh discipline in predominantly low-income schools serving minoritized communities pushes youths of colour out of schools and into the juvenile system” (Lesnick, 2023). Avoidance of discussions involving race and racism in education “intellectually disarms” people, blocking meaningful interracial understanding. This “disarming” helps to fuel the environment that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline (Ali, 2018). For all students, it constructs a false sense of who is credible, who is threatening, and ultimately, who is guilty. When education presents a narrow version of history, it also shapes narrow ideas about who is dangerous, who is a victim, and who deserves the benefit of the doubt. These early-formed stereotypes influence everything from eyewitness misidentification to jury decisions and media narratives, even on a subconscious level. Some key examples are those of contrast between the sentencing of Brock Turner and that of Black defendants like Albert Wilson. In 2016, Turner, a white Stanford student, was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman and received only six months in jail on a maximum 14-year sentence. He only served three months after the judge pushed the idea of his promising future as a reason for leniency (Cbc, 2016). In comparison, Albert Wilson, a then 20-year-old Black college student in Kansas, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for kissing and briefly engaging in physical contact in a college bar in 2016, despite no evidence of rape and significant doubts about the investigation. Just like Turner, Wilson had no prior criminal record, a clean background, had goals and aspirations yet served 48 times longer than Turner did. He was released on bond in March 2024, and by December 2021, the case was dropped. However, he has still not received an official declaration of innocence. He is currently pursuing a lawsuit for being wrongfully convicted (Clark, 2024). These cases show how race and privilege often influence sentencing: Turner was portrayed as a young man with potential whose life shouldn’t be ruined for “20 minutes of action”, while Wilson was sentenced to the maximum penalty without solid evidence.

Stolen childhoods

Skewed standards have real consequences: 53% of wrongful convictions involve Black individuals, despite them making up under 14% of the U.S. population (Wise, 2022). Misidentification and coerced confessions are two of the biggest causes of wrongful convictions, both driven by racial bias. A perfect example of this is The Central Park Five case, where five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted in 1989 for the assault and rape of a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. Despite only being 14 to 16 years old, they were not portrayed as children but as violent threats. The boys were interrogated for long hours without legal counsel or any guardians present, and were ultimately coerced into giving false confessions. At the time, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four major New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty, which painted these boys as guilty before the trial even took place. Media outlets referred to them as a "wolf pack," stripping them of their individuality and instead framing them as collective predators (BBC, 2019). The Central Park Five were exonerated in 2002 when another man confessed and DNA evidence backed his claim, but the damage was already done. Their story is an unsettling reminder of what goes on when society teaches a one-sided version of truth where certain lives are valued more, and others are presumed guilty before they can even speak for themselves. 

The traps behind wrongful convictions 

Faulty eyewitness identification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions. Research shows that in 75% or more of the first 180 DNA exoneration cases in the United States, eyewitness errors took place (Buchanan, 2020). This problem is heightened because the human mind can not record every detail and can reconstruct memories through constantly being altered by new experiences and ideas. Influences such as short exposure to the culprit, the cross-race effect, and time gaps can significantly reduce the accuracy of facial recognition. Prejudice can also make it difficult to recognise faces of other races, as individuals may focus on racial stereotypes rather than facial differences, with a vast majority of exonerations involving White female victims misidentifying African American males. 

False confessions are the second leading cause of wrongful convictions, accounting for about 25% of cases identified since the late 1980s. The National Innocence Project estimates that two-thirds of DNA exonerations in homicide cases involve false confessions (Buchanan, 2020). Confessions are viewed as compelling proof of guilt, making it difficult to reverse a conviction once a false confession is made at trial. Police-induced false confessions often result from a process involving psychological influence and compliance. Tactics like confronting suspects with non-existent eyewitnesses, false confessions from other defendants, and false evidence and promises are used to convince them that confessing is their best option. Police officers often face pressure to solve crimes quickly, which can lead to significant errors and forced confessions, especially when a suspect is so mentally broken down that they will confess to anything to be freed from psychological torment. Although the Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission (OPOTC) curriculum emphasizes the importance of voluntary confessions through following constitutional protections, it is built on interrogation tactics from the Reid Technique, which is a tactic widely criticized for false confessions (Moore & Fitzsimmons). 

Prevention vs clean up

While exoneration is crucial, it’s a downstream response; it only helps those who have already suffered the harms of wrongful conviction. To truly address injustice, we need upstream solutions that target the root of the issue. This starts with education. Reforming school curricula to include diverse voices, systemic truths, and honest portrayals of history is essential to create meaningful change. High schools should offer classes that teach critical thinking and challenge bias early on, helping students unlearn the foundation of skewed narratives they've inherited (Judson, 2017). This kind of educational reform is prevention; it can disrupt the formation of the harmful assumptions that contribute to wrongful convictions in the first place. Meanwhile, downstream efforts like the work done by organizations such as Youth for Innocence are vital. These include fighting for exoneration, reintegration support, and pushing for recognition for those who have been affected directly and indirectly. But reactive justice is not enough. Without changing the stories we teach and the truths we ignore, we will always be cleaning up a mess that could have been prevented. Greater transparency, including increased electronic recording of interrogations and full discovery in criminal cases, can also lead to better outcomes by helping investigators and prosecutors resist biased pressure (Buchanan,2017).

Rewriting the narrative

Curriculum gaps aren’t just about education, they’re about justice. When we erase or distort the histories of marginalized communities, we create a bias that quietly seeps into every part of society. If we want to end wrongful convictions, we can’t just focus on fixing the system after it fails; we need to prevent the failure from happening in the first place. That starts with rewriting the narrative; we need to challenge the biases we have gained, learn the histories that were left out, and push for curriculum reform that reflects truth and representation. Educators are encouraged to provide more "windows" for all students to engage with accurate and inclusive tellings of history through representing the lives, interests, contributions, experiences, and perspectives of all races of people (Denevi, 2020). Schools need to offer students of colour more opportunities to see themselves positively reflected in the curriculum to put an end to the effects of white supremacy. When Black history and literature electives are stripped from classrooms, as recently seen in the Francis Howell School District, it sends a strong message of exclusion. These acts of erasure not only deny students of colour access to their cultural heritage but also stall the development of an affirming racial identity. As Jarvis Givens powerfully states, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom,” showing how the systematic erasure of Black existence in educational settings is tied to the patterns of violence enacted against Black communities (Henry, 2023). As Clint Smith says, "at some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it." (Henry, 2023). The journey involves moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence in understanding racialisation and challenging false narratives (Denevi, 2020 ). The challenge of dismantling bias through educational reform is like tending to a garden. If our educational system (soil) is filled with misleading narratives and incomplete histories (weeds), then the students (plants) will grow with distorted perceptions and implicit biases. Learn more, speak up, and support both education reform and the work of organizations like Youth for Innocence. Change starts with us.