A new arti­cle in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science enti­tled ​“Convicting the Innocent” by Prof. Samuel Gross of the Universiry of Michigan Law School explores the rate of false con­vic­tions among death-sen­tenced inmates and exam­ines the demo­graph­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al pre­dic­tors of such errors. Prof. Gross not­ed that ear­li­er research showed the exon­er­a­tion rate to be 2.3% for inmates who had been on death row at least 15 years and a sim­i­lar rate for those who had been on death row for at least 20 years. He fur­ther not­ed, ​“This fig­ure – 2.3% – is the actu­al pro­por­tion of exon­er­a­tions for death sen­tences imposed in the United States between 1973 and 1989.” He con­cludes that this error rate is prob­a­bly a low esti­mate of the true rate of mis­tak­en con­vic­tions: ​“The pro­por­tion of cap­i­tal exon­er­a­tions is almost cer­tain­ly an under­es­ti­mate of the true rate of false capital convictions.” 

(Samuel R. Gross, ​“Convicting the Innocent,” 4 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 173 (2008). See Innocence and Law Reviews.

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