On November 19, 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released Fatal Flaws: Innocence, Race and Wrongful Convictions, the second installment in its multi-part series examining racialized and structural failures in the nation’s capital punishment system. The first report of the series, Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury, explored how the process of death qualification distorts the composition of capital juries. This newly published 24-page report focuses on how “racism, human error, and systemic failure” play into wrongful convictions, particularly those imposed on Black men. The report examines the factors that led to these wrongful convictions and highlights the human stories behind them.
“The death penalty was built on a foundation of racism, and those roots still shape how it works today.”
The report gives a brief overview of the racial history of the death penalty, linking its development to slavery, Black Codes, and the era of racialized terror lynchings. It notes how the characteristics of capital “trials” common to this pre-modern era — official misconduct, perjury, mistaken witnesses, and non-diverse juries — “continue to contribute to wrongful convictions to this day.”
Filled with extensive data, the report makes a number of key observations about systemic failures which the authors say make “the wrongful conviction of Black men an inevitable consequence of the death penalty system.” Citing a 2022 National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) report, the report notes Black people are more than seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes than white people.
The report reminds that police or prosecutorial misconduct, including coercing witnesses, concealing exculpatory evidence, falsifying reports, or condoning perjury, is the “single most common factor” in wrongful death penalty convictions, especially for people of color. Police and prosecutorial misconduct appeared in 70.7% of Black exonerees’ cases and 93.8% of Latinx exonerees’ cases.
The report also notes that eyewitness misidentification played a role in twenty percent of wrongful capital convictions and is “especially likely when the witness and suspect are of different races,” according to the ACLU.
“A 2020 study examining 89 criminal cases in one district in Mississippi found prosecutors were more than four times more likely to strike Black jurors compared to white jurors.”
According to the report, racial bias in jury selection “stacks the deck against defendants.” The death qualification process and racial bias lead to the exclusion of Black jurors and tends to “produce conviction-prone juries that do not represent the community.”
The report also references findings from DPI that Black death row exonerees wait over four years longer than their white counterparts to be cleared of the charges for which they were wrongly convicted.
“The only true protection against wrongful convictions and executions based on racial bias is abolition of the death penalty.”
Among the report’s policy recommendations is a call for the expansion of post-conviction relief and accountability. The report suggests enacting or strengthening Racial Justice Acts (RJA) for claims showing racial bias in jury selection. It suggests the creation of independent oversight boards to investigate racial bias and prosecutorial misconduct. Recommended federal actions include enacting legislation to end the death penalty, funding forensic science to eliminate wrongful convictions and funding national data collection and research on racial disparities.
The full ACLU report can be read here: https://www.aclu.org/publications/fatal-flaws-innocence-race-and-wrongful-convictions
