A conviction occurs when a judge or jury finds someone guilty of a crime. Having a conviction on your record can affect your job applications, professional licensing, and even travel abroad. Generally, criminal records are considered public information and can be searched by anyone.
A conviction can also include pleas of nolo contendere, deferred prosecution, or Stipulated Orders of Continuances (SOCs). In general, however, a conviction will remain on your record for life unless expunged or pardoned.
In the United States, prosecutors and defense attorneys work to get their clients acquitted or sentenced to the lowest possible punishment. But the truth is that innocent people are still convicted of crimes they did not commit. Wrongful convictions occur for many reasons, including eyewitness misidentifications, jailhouse informant tampering, and mistakes in forensic lab testing. The Innocence Project reports that DNA evidence has led to the exoneration of dozens of wrongfully convicted people in recent years.
Conviction is a cognitive and embodied mental state that develops through a combination of heuristics, simple rules, more or less implicit models, beliefs, and emotional reactions to information in the context of one’s life and social environment. These components are woven into conviction narratives that provide experienced rather than abstract “knowledge” about the outcome of an action, and these narratives guide, but do not replace, deliberative thinking. These narratives are a critical element of a person’s ability to make decisions under radical uncertainty. Nevertheless, these narratives may be inaccurate and biased.
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