That's Andrew Cohen's latest post at the Altantic looking at the impact of the National Registry of Exonerations. It's a must-read.
Last Monday, investigators, lawyers, and writers at the Columbia Human Rights Law Review published a groundbreaking book-length piece chronicling how Texas executed an innocent man in 1989. The piece is remarkable for how deep down its authors dug to establish how and why Carlos DeLuna was executed for a crime that Carlos Hernandez almost certainly committed. Old news, proclaimed Texas prosecutors (on Twitter, no less) last week, and to a certain extent they are right. It's hard to get people focused upon a case that's a generation old. It's what has happened since DeLuna that matters.
And that's why this Monday brings such another important contribution to the debate over criminal justice in America. Early this morning, a vital new entity, the National Registry of Exonerations, published its first-ever report that picks up where the DeLuna case left off. The study results are grim: By one measure, at least 2,000 people have been falsely convicted of serious crimes in America since 1989. If Columbia Law School dug to the depths in a single case, the Registry has scanned wide the horizon in hundreds of cases to reveal both the progress made and the scope of the problem that remains.
A joint project administered by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, the Registry profiled 873 specific cases of exoneration from 1989 through March 1, 2012. Not surprisingly, most of the men and women who were wrongfully convicted (61 percent) were black or Hispanic. As a group, the 873 exonerated defendants spent more than 10,000 years in prison -- an average of more than 11 years each. And of the 873 exonerees, nearly half, 416 to be exact, were wrongly convicted of murder. Of those, 101 were sentenced to death.
How does this happen? Why are there so many wrongful convictions when there is so much at stake for both the defendants and the victims and when we pride ourselves on a legal system designed to ensure meaningful judicial review? The reasons are legion. It matters where you are convicted, for example, and the color of your skin matters too. And it matters who your police and prosecutors and judges are. The report reveals that in a whopping 56 percent of murder-case exonerations the initial convictions was based upon "official misconduct." Carlos DeLuna, we know, was not alone.
The Registry tells us that there have been 102 exonerations of child abuse convictions, 58 exonerations in cases of non-violent crimes and 135 exonerations of defendants who actually confessed to crimes they didn't commit. It tells us more than I can list here, which is why it is so well worth reading.
Earlier coverage the Registry begins at the link.
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