A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations, released today, reports that at least 1300 people falsely convicted of crimes were exonerated over the past 25 years, with many more cases yet to be discovered. In 2013, there were 87 known exonerations, which made 2013 a “record-breaking” year for exonerations in the United States.
According to the report, “Contrary to popular belief, the report, ‘Exonerations in 2013,’ shows that the number of exonerations in which DNA played a role has gradually declined since 2005, and only represented about a fifth of the total number of exonerations in 2013. In the same period, the number of non-DNA exonerations per year doubled from 34 in 2005 to 69 in 2013.”
27 of the 87 known exonerations, almost one-third of the year’s total, were cases in which no crime in fact occurred. In 15 of the cases, 17 percent, the defendants were convicted after pleading guilty. The registry reports that the rate of exonerations after a guilty plea has doubled since 2008 and the number continues to grow.
“Almost half of these no-crime exonerations were for non-violent crimes, primarily drug convictions,” the Registry reports.
Thirty-three (33) known exonerations in 2013 — 38 percent — were obtained at the initiative or with the cooperation of law enforcement. The report argues, “This is the second highest annual total of exonerations with law enforcement cooperation, down slightly from 2012, but consistent with an upward trend in police and prosecutors taking increasingly active roles in reinvestigating possible false convictions.”
In 2013, Reginald Griffin, who had been sentenced to death in Missouri, was exonerated, bringing the total number of death row exonerations to 143 across 26 states since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The ten states with the most recorded exonerations in 2013 were: Texas (13), Illinois (9), New York (8), Washington (7), California (6), Michigan (5), Missouri (5), Connecticut (4), Georgia (4), and Virginia (4). The states with the most recorded exonerations are not necessarily those where most false convictions have occurred.
“Exonerations are on the rise, and a lot of the credit goes to prosecutors and police who are increasingly active in investigating possible false convictions. But there are many false convictions that we don’t know about,” said Michigan Law professor Samuel Gross, editor of the Registry and an author of the report. “The exonerations we know about are only the tip of the iceberg.”
“More people are now paying attention to wrongful convictions. Police, prosecutors, judges and the public are all more aware of the danger of convicting innocent defendants,” said Professor Gross.
“The more we learn about wrongful convictions, the better we’ll be at preventing them – and of course at correcting them after the fact as best we can,” said Rob Warden, co-founder of the Registry and Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. “Studying the reasons for wrongful convictions – perjury, mistaken identification, official misconduct, false confessions, misleading forensic evidence – will lead to fewer convictions of the innocent.”
For years, most of the post-conviction exonerations occurred when old evidence from the crime scene was able to be analyzed using newly-available DNA testing.
There was some thought that, as the old DNA cases were exhausted, the number of exonerations would drop. At the same time, there was a widespread belief that, because DNA evidence is only available in a small handful of cases, the real number of wrongful convictions was very low.
That theory has been challenged with the new data.
The report finds that the “number of DNA exonerations continued to decline slowly, as it has for most of the past decade, while the number of non-DNA exonerations rose sharply.” In 2005, the number of exonerations was 23; now it is just 18, a small decline.
However, “In the same period the number of non-DNA exonerations rose from 34 in 2005, to 59 in 2012, to 69 in 2013. The net result is that DNA exonerations, which have always been a minority of known exonerations in the United States, were about a fifth of the total in 2013.”
“The great majority of exonerations in every year we have studied were homicide and sexual assault cases. In 2013, we had 40 murder exonerations – including one exoneration of a prisoner who had been sentenced to death – and 18 exonerations that involved rape or other sexual assault,” the Registry reports.
The report finds, “But the proportion of exonerations that do not involve rape or murder has grown over time, from 18% from 1989 through 1998 to 24% from 2009 through 2013. In 2013, 29 exonerations, 33% of the total, did not involve either of these extreme crimes of violence – a record number of exonerations in such cases, and a comparatively high proportion of all exonerations.”
Overall, they argue that the trends are related. They write, “One common theme is the type of evidence that’s available to prove the defendant’s innocence. If there’s DNA from the actual criminal that does not match the defendant, proof of innocence is straightforward; otherwise it’s much harder. It’s harder yet when there’s no way at all to identify the person who actually did it because the defendant was convicted of a crime that didn’t occur: a homicide that was really an accident, a sexual assault that never happened or a non-existent drug crime for which he was framed.”
The second theme has to do with resources and attention. They write, “Exoneration stories often note with approval that the defendant ‘always protested his innocence.’ On the other hand, innocent defendants who plead guilty have a much harder time getting attention and help from anybody – friends and relatives, the media, innocence projects, prosecutors, police, courts.”
“One reason is that those who plead guilty get lesser sentences, and scarce resources are allocated first to those who might be executed or spend all or most of their lives in prison,” they find.
Therefore priority is given to murder and rape cases, “the most serious common crimes of violence with the harshest sentences.”
However, 2013 shows that exonerations are changing and “that we are increasingly willing to consider and act on the types of innocence claims that are often ignored: those without biological evidence or with no actual perpetrator; cases with comparatively light sentences; judgments based on guilty pleas by defendants who accepted plea bargains to avoid the risk of extreme punishment after trial. The recent increase in the number of exonerations initiated by law enforcement directly shows that police and prosecutors have become more attentive and concerned about the danger of false conviction.”
Exonerations, however, are still retroactive. They occur after individuals have spent years of their lives in custody for crimes that they did not commit. Those exonerated in 2013 were convicted more than 12 years prior and in some cases were only released after spending decades in custody, as long as 30 years.
They write, “There is no way to tell from these cases whether we are getting better at avoiding wrongful convictions in the first place. It does seem, however, that we are working harder to identify the mistakes we made years ago and that we are catching more of them. If we are also learning from those tragic errors that have come to light, that would be a big step in the right direction.”
Read the full report, which includes a separate detailed summary of all known exonerations from 1989 through 2013, here.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Wow! Ajay Dev’s case certainly fit’s within this pattern. I think about his case every morning and pray for his complete exoneration in 2014. Thanks David for sharing this most encouraging data.
Great article! Thank you for continuing to research and write about major issues with the criminal justice system. We can only hope that Ajay will be exonerated this year!