DPIC Adds Eleven Cases to Innocence List, Bringing National Death-Row Exoneration Total to 185

New research by the Death Penalty Information Center has found 11 pre­vi­ous­ly unrecord­ed death-row exon­er­a­tions, bring­ing the total num­ber of peo­ple exon­er­at­ed after being wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death to 185. The data now show that for every 8.3 peo­ple who have been put to death in the U.S. since exe­cu­tions resumed in the 1970s, one per­son who had been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death has been exon­er­at­ed. Wrongful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions occurred in vir­tu­al­ly every part of the coun­try, with exon­er­a­tions doc­u­ment­ed in 29 states and 118 different counties. 

“Everybody’s worst fear about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is that inno­cent peo­ple will be wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and exe­cut­ed,” said Robert Dunham, DPIC’s Executive Director. ​“But the more we learn about what actu­al­ly hap­pens in these cas­es, the worse the prob­lem gets. As long as the legal sys­tem involves humans, it is guar­an­teed to make mis­takes. But most inno­cent peo­ple who are wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sent to death row don’t get there by mis­take. The data from these 185 exon­er­a­tions shows that far more fre­quent­ly, and par­tic­u­lar­ly with peo­ple of col­or, inno­cent death row pris­on­ers were con­vict­ed because of a com­bi­na­tion of police or pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and per­jury or oth­er false testimony.” 

Analysis of the 185 inno­cence cas­es reveals dis­turb­ing pat­terns of offi­cial mis­con­duct and racial bias. Nearly 70% of the exon­er­a­tions involved mis­con­duct by police, pros­e­cu­tors, or oth­er gov­ern­ment offi­cials. 80% of wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions involved some com­bi­na­tion of mis­con­duct or perjury/​false accu­sa­tion and more than half involved both. Cases that involved mis­con­duct took longer, on aver­age, to reach exon­er­a­tion. Misconduct was impli­cat­ed in all 8 of the exon­er­a­tions that took more than 30 years and 88% of exon­er­a­tions that took 21 – 30 years. Misconduct occurred more often in cas­es involv­ing Black exonerees (78.8%) than white exonerees (58.2%). Black exonerees spent an aver­age of 4.3 more years wait­ing for exon­er­a­tion than white exonerees. 

Outlier prac­tices con­tributed to wrong­ful death sen­tences. More than 15 per­cent of all death-row exon­er­a­tions in the U.S. are in cas­es in which tri­al judges over­ruled jury rec­om­men­da­tions for life or imposed the death penal­ty based on non-unan­i­mous jury votes for death. At least 23 exon­er­a­tions in Florida, five in Alabama, and one in Delaware involved this outlier practice. 

Jurisdictions with heavy use of the death penal­ty and his­to­ries of police and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct had the largest num­bers of death-row exon­er­a­tions. While 91 coun­ties with wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions have pro­duced one exon­er­a­tion each, the 27 coun­ties with mul­ti­ple exon­er­a­tions col­lec­tive­ly account for a major­i­ty (50.2%) of the country’s death-row exon­er­a­tions. Cook County (Chicago), Illinois wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and con­demned 15 death-row exonerees since 1973, more than dou­ble the num­ber of any oth­er coun­ty in the United States. It is fol­lowed by Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio; and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, with six exon­er­a­tions each. Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona; and Oklahoma County (Oklahoma City), Oklahoma had five each. By them­selves, these five coun­ties account for 37 death-row exon­er­a­tions, one fifth of the nation’s total. And more than 95 per­cent of the wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions and death sen­tences in these coun­ties involved some com­bi­na­tion of police or pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and/​or wit­ness per­jury or false accusation. 

A new exam­i­na­tion of exon­er­a­tions involv­ing DNA evi­dence sug­gests that many more inno­cence cas­es remain unde­tect­ed because DNA evi­dence was unavail­able or courts refused to per­mit test­ing. Because the pres­ence or absence of DNA evi­dence in a case should have no effect on what fac­tors cause a wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tion, large dif­fer­ences between the caus­es of wrong­ful con­vic­tions in the DNA cas­es and in the cas­es with no DNA are red flags of where courts may have unjust­ly denied or erro­neous­ly cred­it­ed false evi­dence that could have been dis­proven by DNA. In par­tic­u­lar, mis­con­duct, false or fab­ri­cat­ed con­fes­sions, and ques­tion­able foren­sic or wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny were proven to be present much more fre­quent­ly in the cas­es involv­ing DNA evi­dence. Official mis­con­duct was a con­tribut­ing fac­tor in 85.7% of exon­er­a­tions involv­ing DNA evi­dence, but only 66.2% of those with­out DNA. False or fab­ri­cat­ed con­fes­sions were present 4.3 times more fre­quent­ly in the DNA exon­er­a­tions (46.4%) than in cas­es with­out DNA (10.8%), and false or mis­lead­ing foren­sic evi­dence was exposed 2.9 times more fre­quent­ly (71.4%) in the DNA cas­es than in the non-DNA exon­er­a­tions (24.8%). Mistaken wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tions were found more than twice as fre­quent­ly in the DNA exon­er­a­tions (35.7%) than in the exon­er­a­tions with­out DNA (17.2%)

The DPIC analy­sis shows that DNA may be a crit­i­cal ele­ment in uncov­er­ing inno­cence in wrong­ful con­vic­tion cas­es that might oth­er­wise pro­ceed to exe­cu­tion. Kirk Bloodsworth, Executive Director of Witness to Innocence and the first death-row sur­vivor to be exon­er­at­ed by DNA, said of the new report, ​“with such a large num­ber of mis­takes uncov­ered, there’s no need to won­der any­more, we can also be sure that inno­cent peo­ple have been executed.” 

The eleven new cas­es are listed below.