How we identified interventions to reduce wrongful convictions in the Canadian legal system

In a team of four, we applied systems thinking to understand and improve the way the Canadian legal system handles wrongful convictions.

Challenge

In 2012 alone 2,470 wrongful convictions were reported in Canada. We wanted to find out why and what we could do to change it.

Approach

First, we conducted expert interviews with a number of defence lawyers and the founder of Toronto’s Innocence Project.

A responsibility assignment matrix of the stakeholders informed our engagement with the experts. We continued to iterate and validate our findings with the experts.

Participatory design research was done using stimuli for participants to map out their interpretations of real wrongful conviction cases.

The more we learned, the more we mapped. We turned our data into knowledge by continuously iterating…