IN A grim cell somewhere in Australia sits a prisoner who is innocent of the crime they have been convicted of.

It’s anyone’s worst nightmare — but for some Australians it’s a reality, says the founder and director of the Sydney Exoneration Project, Dr Celine van Golde.

“You don’t want to think of the possibility you are accused of crime you didn’t commit and go to jail. But it does happen and we hear about it more and more.”

Dr van Golde set up the Exoneration Project at the University of Sydney last year, and after considering several applications, now has a case of a convicted Australian prisoner who claims they have been wrongly jailed.

Next month a group of specially selected students from the university’s psychology and laws schools will begin to put a convicted Australian prisoner’s case under the microscope to see if there really has been a miscarriage of justice.

The identity of the prisoner is confidential, but Dr van Golde told news.com.au they contacted the project after seeing a documentary about wrongful convictions.

“They said, ‘This is what happened in my case.’”

Trial files, interviews, witness statements. Nothing is off limits for the students, who will earn course credits for their work.

Wrongful convictions are usually associated with the United States legal system — where many innocence projects are well established — but the same thing could happen here.

It was a disturbing and uncomfortable thought for most people because it exposed the “flaws in the legal system”, leading people to question how such an injustice could happen in a “civilised society that we think is very fair”.

When asked if she thought there were people in Australia behind bars who were innocent, Dr van Golde replied: “Yes.”

“It’s scary. You don’t want to think like that.”

The Sydney Exoneration Project is unique because it will use forensic psychology to look at wrongful convictions, rather than DNA evidence which is more typical in the US. False confessions and false memories, which led to mistaken identification, are major areas of research for forensic psychology.

And in almost three-quarters of cases it is mistaken identity that leads to a wrongful conviction.

“We don’t start working on a case thinking this person is innocent and we’re working to try and prove their innocence. We don’t get tunnel-visioned one way or the other way and stay objective.

“We have looked at data from the United States [and you see] the key reasons where people go to jail when they are innocent all have to do with topics that we study in forensic psychology — and mistaken identification is the number one reason people go to jail when they’re innocent. Somebody identifies them as the perpetrator.”

There were two sides to the project.

“On the one hand it’s social justice, to make sure if a person is innocent they are not locked up in jail. But it also means if an innocent person is locked up, there is a guilty person on the outside.”

Many were under the mistaken belief there was some “conspiracy” fuelling wrongful convictions because people were “out there trying to get you”.

That’s fine for the movies, but in most cases the reality was the mistakes were unintentional.

“People don’t want to believe mistakes can happen. But they do. Even though we trust our brains and our memories and our ability to see things, mistakes still happen.”

Police and the courts relied heavily on photo identification and matching people’s faces. And with good reason. But the method isn’t 100 per cent accurate.

“We know from research that if I took two pictures of you taken at different parts of the day, or with a different camera, and ask a person who doesn’t know you if it’s the same person in both pictures, there is a high chance they won’t say that it is.”

She pointed to other research of decision-making by juries that showed they were more likely to convict after hearing from an eyewitness “independent of any other evidence”.

“So just having a person saying, ‘I saw it with my own eyes — that’s the person there,’ it doesn’t matter what the other evidence is you present afterwards.”

There is no reliable data on how many wrongful convictions there are in Australia, mainly because there is no independent body with the power and resources to investigate wrongful convictions, which can be hard to identify.

Among the most high profile are the cases of Lindy Chamberlain, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering baby Azaria in 1982; Andrew Mallard ,who was wrongfully convicted of murdering; Western Australian woman Pamela Lawrence, who served 12 years in jail; Alexander McLeod-Lindsay, who served a nine-year jail term for the attempted murder of his wife before he was eventually exonerated; and NSW woman Roseanne Beckett, who served 10 years for planning to kill her husband but was exonerated in 2001. She was recently awarded $4 million in damages by the NSW Government.

Shows like Making A Murderer and the massive popularity around podcast Serial has made popular the sort of work Dr van Golde and her students are about to embark on.

“It’s quite funny, with Serial my friends were saying, ‘This is the best thing.’ And I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been working on,’ and trying to explain. So they get it now.”

That subject of Serial’s first season, Adnan Syed, is currently trying to have his murder case heard again in a new trial.

The subject of the Sydney Exoneration Project will no doubt be hoping for the same opportunity and prove, as they have been claiming, that they were innocent but found guilty.

andrew.koubaridis@news.com.au