Study: 2,000 convicted then exonerated in 23 years

An exonerated defendant walks free from a Texas prison for the first time in this undated photo. / CBS News

(AP) WASHINGTON - More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities.

There is no official record-keeping system for exonerations of convicted criminals in the country, so academics set one up. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled.

The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.

They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American.

Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.

DNA evidence led to exoneration in nearly one-third of the 416 homicides and in nearly two-thirds of the 305 sexual assaults.

Researchers estimate the total number of felony convictions in the United States is nearly a million a year.

(At left, watch CBS News correspondent Mark Strassman's report on a support group in Texas for the recently exonerated, where the problem of false convictions is so bad it has driven victims of it to band together.)

The overall registry/list begins at the start of 1989. It gives an unprecedented view of the scope of the problem of wrongful convictions in the United States and the figure of more than 2,000 exonerations "is a good start," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

"We know there are many more that we haven't found," added University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, the editor of the newly opened National Registry of Exonerations.

Counties such as San Bernardino in California and Bexar County in Texas are heavily populated, yet seemingly have no exonerations, a circumstance that the academics say cannot possibly be correct.

The registry excludes at least 1,170 additional defendants. Their convictions were thrown out starting in 1995 amid the periodic exposures of 13 major police scandals around the country. In all the cases, police officers fabricated crimes, usually by planting drugs or guns on innocent defendants.

Regarding the 1,170 additional defendants who were left out of the registry, "we have only sketchy information about most of these cases," the report said. "Some of these group exonerations are well known; most are comparatively obscure. We began to notice them by accident, as a byproduct of searches for individual cases."

In half of the 873 exonerations studied in detail, the most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony or false accusations. Forty-three percent of the cases involved mistaken eyewitness identification, and 24 percent of the cases involved false or misleading forensic evidence.

In two out of three homicides, perjury or false accusation was the most common factor leading to false conviction. In four out of five sexual assaults, mistaken eyewitness identification was the leading cause of false conviction.

Seven percent of the exonerations were drug, white-collar and other nonviolent crimes, 5 percent were robberies and 5 percent were other types of violent crimes.

"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. This is a sea change," said Gross.

Exonerations often take place with no public fanfare and the 106-page report that coincides with the opening of the registry explains why.

On TV, an exoneration looks like a singular victory for a criminal defense attorney, "but there's usually someone to blame for the underlying tragedy, often more than one person, and the common culprits include defense lawyers as well as police officers, prosecutors and judges. In many cases, everybody involved has egg on their face," according to the report.

Despite a claim of wrongful conviction that was widely publicized last week, a Texas convict executed two decades ago is not in the database because he has not been officially exonerated. Carlos deLuna was executed for the fatal stabbing of a Corpus Christi convenience store clerk. A team headed by a Columbia University law professor just published a 400-page report that contends DeLuna didn't kill the clerk, Wanda Jean Lopez.

[Witness-Toitall]

I attended a trial where it appeared that a policeman witness lied about what he saw. I visited the scene, afterward, and came away pretty certain that I am correct. Nevertheless, the right guy was convicted of dealing crack. The problem is that the defendant was a minor street-level dealer - so there wasn't much incentive for the officer to lie - and it left me figuring that perjured testimony may be business as usual for some police.

It is common to deify soldiers and police, going well beyond showing due respect. We rationalize their excesses and lapses of professionalism when, like every other employee in society from scientists to bank tellers, some are likely to fudge their performance. We need to hold everybody accountable, not least those armed by the state.

Meanwhile, we need to call off capital punishment. There really are too many questions, too many times.

[RJG_TX]

Bexar County has over 5,000 cases with DNA evidence which both the Police and District Attorney refuse to test. No wonder there are no exonerations according to their own statistics.

[kayp47]

Tip of the iceberg.

[credibility2]

This isn't so much a situation of the system being racist, since whites are also wrongly convicted. The DNA science has greatly advanced in recent decades. Some victims often identify their accusers based on emotion rather than rationale. Some accused think they'll get better treatment if they cooperate. Some accused lie about having committed a crime. Some accused have inept legal counsel. Some police are overly zealous. Some prosecution are overly zealous. Clearly wrong convictions happen, and that too is part of an imperfect system. Were the system perfect, no crimes would ever be committed and there would be no need for police, lawyers, judges, juries or prisons.

[credibility2]

...I'm sure given the number of convicted and incarcerated, this number is miniscule...

[unclebernies]

This is an argument of why the death penalty is outdated and should be removed from the legal system. If someone is a dirtbag criminal then just lock them up and throw away the key. There is way too many people that really are innocent sitting in prison and executing one once in a while is unacceptable.

[venusvegasvada]

It would have been helpful if they had stated what the average number of total felony convictions, per year, has been over the last 20 or more years. They only estimate that it's a million per year now.

That forces one to guess at extrapolating what the total number has been over the last 23 years. Has it been steady at a million a year? If so, then out of 23 million total felony convictions, 2,000 to 3,000 have been exonerated as being false?

3,000 out of 23 million is one out of every 7,660 or so convictions. That's close to your odds of being killed in the US in an automobile accident (one in 7,700 people will die in an auto accident per year, according to the USDT).

Ref:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/how-risky-is-flying.html

I suppose no system is perfect, but what is surprising is the amount of time (11 years) the average falsely accused person spends in prison until they are exonerated. I wonder what impact technology has on that number? Could it be a function that the tech to clear them just didn't exist at the time of conviction and the person had to wait till there was data that could provide the clarity?

I'd say this is an interesting start and should be very helpful, in time, at drilling down and helping more people not only get convicted falsely in the first place, but also decrease the time they spend in the system until the error is found.

Good work!

[Nessimp]

So, by your estimates, 0.013% of convictions have been shown to be false.

They say we would rather let 10 men go free than see 1 man falsely convicted. But it appears we are closer to 10,000:1.

I'd say that's far better than I expected and not too bad, all things considered.

[venusvegasvada]

Yup

[djseavy]

The problem is that the criminal justice system is full of politics. Prosecutors only want convictions so they can get elected to higher offices. They will do anything and everything to get a conviction. Defendants are tried by innuendo and inference - not necessarily facts. When prosecutors break the rules, appeals courts claim the infraction is harmless. It's not harmless when you're dealing with people's lives. If the defendant has a public defender, forget it. PD's are swamped and just want to get the cases over with. Police will fabricate evidence so they can close the case. I am not for the death penalty because it can create far more victims by executing an innocent person. It's out of control and nobody seems to be able to correct it. Too much at stake politically.

[rubberrezi]

There need s to be much more severe penalties for people responsible for fabricating evidence to obtain a conviction. There will always be mistakes made by evidence fabrication should have a stiff penalty attached for those who do it. Say, the minimum sentence for a fabricator be as many years in prison as the person they lied about received with no parole.

[kenhbradshaw]

Were are we going with this? First I understand 2000, but then I understand that there is concrete evidence in about 40% of those. Now what is the percentage of the questionable ones to the total. We know the system as designed allows wrong.

What is our take away? Don't convict anyone, be better about the way crimes are prosecuted, do away with capital punishment? Being better about how we prosecute, I am entirely in favor of. (I personally know people that I would not have convicted.) But I am in favor of convicting people and of the death penalty.

[realist2010]

What do we take away from this? Our legal system is flawed and it might be a good idea to keep that in mind when celebrating someone's execution or sentence.