Fabricated justice: How due process reform enables evidence manipulation

This paper examines how due process reforms enable evidence manipulation. During the past two decades, most Latin American countries have radically reformed their criminal justice systems, with the aim of strengthening rights protections and curbing abuses. Focusing on Mexico, we uncover a paradox of these institutional reforms: confronted with social pressures to punish crimes, police officers and prosecutors with limited investigation capacities fabricate criminal cases that pretend to conform with stricter judicial standards. Using difference-in-differences designs with a representative prison survey and ethnographic fieldwork among criminal prosecutors, we document a decline in torture and a parallel rise in convictions grounded in fabricated evidence, most commonly planted drugs and weapons. This shift toward what we call “fabricated justice” has fueled an increase in drug trafficking convictions. This recent increase in planted evidence suggests that when rule of law reforms are implemented without corresponding investments in state capacity, they can generate new and unexpected forms of abuse.