Reports Find Record Number of Exonerations in 2016, Blacks More Likely to be Wrongfully Convicted

Companion reports released on March 7 by the National Registry of Exonerations found record numbers of exonerations and wrongful convictions involving official misconduct in 2016, and striking evidence of racial bias both in the wrongful convictions themselves and in the time it took the judicial process to exonerate the wrongfully incarcerated. The Registry’s report, Exonerations in 2016, found a record 166 exonerations in 2016, with 54 defendants exonerated of homicide.

A DPIC review of the Registry’s data revealed that the death penalty played a role in nearly a quarter of the homicide exonerations. In at least six of the wrongful homicide convictions, prosecutors had sought the death penalty at trial; in another, an innocent defendant had pled guilty to avoid the death penalty; and at least six additional exonerations were the product of witnesses having falsely implicated innocent defendants after police had threatened the witness or a loved one with the death penalty unless the witness cooperated with the investigation.

The Registry’s companion report, Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, analyzes exonerations for murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes since 1989. The report found that black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white people and that African Americans imprisoned for murder are more likely to be innocent if they were convicted of killing white victims. Police officers were more likely to have committed misconduct in the cases in which black defendants were exonerated of murder than in exonerations of white murder defendants.

In addition, justice was delayed in exonerations of black murder defendants, who, on average, waited three years longer than whites before being released from prison. An analysis of the DPIC death-row exoneration database corroborates the National Registry’s conclusions: 16 of the last 18 death-row exonerations had police or prosecutorial misconduct as their primary cause. 18 of the exonerees in the last 25 misconduct-related death-row exonerations are black. While 68.8% of wrongly convicted non-black death-row exonerees were exonerated in 10 years or less, it took the judicial system 11 years or more to exonerate 57.3% of the wrongly convicted black death-row exonerees. 84.6% of all cases in which exoneration took 26 years or more involved black defendants.

(“Exonerations in 2016,” National Registry of Exonerations, March 7, 2017; S. Gross, M. Possley, and K. Stephens,”Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States,” National Registry of Exonerations, March 7, 2017; Press Release, March 7, 2017.) See Innocence, Race, Studies, and Prosecutorial Misconduct. Read DPIC’s Statement on the reports.