The National Registry of Exonerations is a great resource that's getting continued media attention.
CNN posts, "More than 2,000 wrongfully convicted people exonerated in 23 years, researchers say." It has graphics and interactive components.
More than 2,000 people have been exonerated of serious crimes since 1989 in the United States, according to a report by college researchers who have established the first national registry of exonerations.
Researchers say their registry is the largest database of these types of cases and showcases some of the major issues with the criminal justice system, including that the leading causes of wrongful convictions are perjury, faulty witness identification and misconduct by prosecutors.
"No matter how tragic they are, even 2,000 exonerations over 23 years is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons and jails," says a report released by the authors. "If that were the extent of the problem we would be encouraged by these numbers. But it’s not. These cases merely point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about."
Read the report (PDF) | Exonerations by state and county (PDF)
The registry itself, which looks deeply into 873 specific cases of wrongful conviction, examined cases based on court documents as well as from groups that have long documented wrongful convictions. That group of wrongfully convicted spent more than 10,000 total years in prison, according to the report, with an average of 11 years each.
"2000 and Growing: Revealing Statistics in Exoneration Study," is Ashby Jones' WSJ Law Blog post.
With increasing frequency, it seems, we get wind of DNA exonerations. Someone who’s served several years in prison gets released after DNA evidence either proves that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime — or puts someone else there in his stead.
It raises the question: Just how many exonerations (due to DNA evidence or otherwise) happen in the U.S.?
The answer, it turns out, is over 2,000 in the last 23 years, according to a study out Monday from the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
The study is part of a broader effort at the schools to build a registry of exonerations to chart just how often it happens, and in what contexts. “It used to be that almost all the exonerations we knew about were murder and rape cases. We’re finally beginning to see beyond that,” said Michigan Law professor Samuel Gross, editor of the registry and an author of the report.
"National Registry Of Exonerations: More Than 2,000 People Freed After Wrongful Convictions," by Michael McLaughlin at Huffington Post.
Some tales of wrongful conviction are well known, like the case of amateur boxer Dewey Bozella.
Bozella was found guilty in 1983 for the murder of an elderly woman. New York police and prosecutors pressed second-degree murder charges propped up by the testimony of witnesses who eventually recanted their testimony. It wasn't until 2007 that Bozella's attorneys discovered major discrepancies and evidence pointing to another suspect, leading to Bozella's release in 2009.
But many stories involving tainted evidence, malingering law enforcement and mistaken eyewitness identification never become common knowledge. The cases outlined on the new National Registry of Exonerations are likely just a fraction of the wrongful imprisonment cases in the United States, researchers told The Huffington Post.
More than 2,000 inmates and ex-cons have been exonerated since 1989, according to the database that aims to track all wrongful convictions in the United States. More than 100 had been sentenced to death.
"This is a beginning," said University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel Gross, one of the database's creators. "One of my great hopes is that this will lead us to learn more about exonerations."
The database, which was developed with members of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Conviction, focused on 873 individual cases. The researchers also identified 13 major police scandals that falsely netted 1,170 other people, although these are not included in the database because they are the results of a collective exoneration based on problems in individual agencies.
"Texas Among Top 3 States in Total Exonerations," is by Brandi Grissom and Ryan Murphy for the Texas Tribune. The report contains a list of all Texas exonerees on the Registry.
The report's lead authors said the project is an unprecedented examination of the scope of wrongful convictions that shows they are far more prevalent than once thought. In Texas, according to the report, there have been 87 exonerations involving crimes ranging from robbery to murder. Only Illinois, with 110, and New York, with 88, had more.
“It used to be that almost all the exonerations we knew about were murder and rape cases. We’re finally beginning to see beyond that,” Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, editor of the registry and an author of the report, said in a news release. “This is a sea change.”
The report, which includes an online searchable database with details on about nearly 900 of the exonerations, details for the first time wrongful convictions in 58 cases involving drugs, taxes, white-collar and other nonviolent crimes; 102 exonerations for child sex abuse convictions; and 129 exonerations of defendants who were convicted of crimes that never happened.
The authors created a separate category for group exonerations, which includes cases of massive law enforcement corruption in Dallas and in Tulia that led to more than 40 exonerations.
The authors note, however, that their work does not encompass all of the wrongful convictions that have happened in the last two decades. Many more cases, they wrote, are probably undiscovered as the wrongfully convicted remain behind bars, die in prison or lack the money to prove their innocence.
They point to the numbers. For instance, in Dallas County, with about 2.4 million people, there have been 36 exonerations. Meanwhile, Bexar County, where the population exceeds 1.7 million, has had none.
"No matter how tragic they are, even 2,000 exonerations over 23 years is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons and jails. If that were the extent of the problem we would be encouraged by these numbers. But it’s not. These cases merely point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about," the report states.
David A. Love writes, "How America's death penalty murders innocents," for the Guardian's Comment Is Free. He's the executive director of Witness to Innocence.
The US criminal justice system is a broken machine that wrongfully convicts innocent people, sentencing thousands of people to prison or to death for the crimes of others, as a new study reveals. The University of Michigan law school and Northwestern University have compiled a new National Registry of Exonerations – a database of over 2,000 prisoners exonerated between 1989 and the present day, when DNA evidence has been widely used to clear the names of innocent people convicted of rape and murder. Of these, 885 have profiles developed for the registry's website, exonerationregistry.org.
The details are shocking. Death row inmates were exonerated nine times more frequently than others convicted of murder. One-fourth of those exonerated of murder had received a death sentence, while half of those who had been wrongfully convicted of rape or murder faced death or a life behind bars. Ten of the inmates went to their grave before their names were cleared.
The leading causes of wrongful convictions include perjury, flawed eyewitness identification and prosecutorial misconduct. For those who have placed unequivocal faith in the US criminal justice system and believe that all condemned prisoners are guilty of the crime of which they were convicted, the data must make for a rude awakening.
"The most important thing we know about false convictions is that they happen and on a regular basis … Most false convictions never see the light of the day," said University of Michigan law professors Samuel Gross and Michael Shaffer, who wrote the study.
"Nobody had an inkling of the serious problem of false confessions until we had this data," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
The unveiling of the exoneration registry comes days after a groundbreaking study from Columbia law school Professor James Liebman and 12 students. Published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, the study describes how Texas executed an innocent man named Carlos DeLuna in 1989. DeLuna was put to death for the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a young woman, at a gas station. Carlos Hernandez, who bragged about committing the murder and bore a striking resemblance to DeLuna, was named at trial by DeLuna's defence team as the actual perpetrator of the crime. But DeLuna's false conviction is merely the tip of the iceberg, as the database suggests.
Earlier coverage of the National Registry of Exonerations begins at the link.