By Diana Quirarte and Michele Chadwick
CHICAGO, IL – Reynaldo Munoz became the 3,000th incarcerated person whose U. S. criminal conviction was thrown out after it was determined that the Chicago conviction was false, according to a statement released by the National Registry of Exonerations this week.
While the Registry considers Munoz to be the 3,000th, it is unclear how many individuals were wrongly convicted because the National Registry of Exonerations’ database is limited prior to 1989.
In 2012, the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law founded the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE).
The NRE has detailed records and information about every wrongful conviction from 1989 and limited information from overturned convictions prior to 1989.
Each exonerated individual has their own page on the website that includes a summary of the alleged crime and arrest, demographic information, and contributing factors that resulted in the wrongful conviction.
Munoz’s page cites “Mistaken Witness ID, Official Misconduct” as the contributing factors in his case.
In the summary of his case, it states that Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara questioned and assaulted Munoz.
“Detective Guevara hit me in the mouth multiple times,” Munoz later said.
Munoz also claims that during this time Guevara drove into hostile gang territory and according to him he “threatened to let me out of the car…He told me that if I didn’t tell him what he needed to know, he would not stop the gang members from doing whatever they were going to do to me. I continued to deny any knowledge of the people he was asking about.”
Munoz was only 16 at the time of his conviction in 1986 and was sentenced to 60 years.
The case was dismissed 37 years after the arrest. A judge who heard of the new uncovered evidence stated, “If even a fraction of the allegations included in this new evidence had been presented at trial … Munoz would likely [have] been acquitted.”
There was more light is shed – Detective Guevara is accused of framing over 50 people for murder.
According to The National Registry of Exoneration their mission statement is “to reform the criminal justice system and reduce if not eliminate these tragic errors in the future.”
The NRE data shows that more than “26,700 years” of individual’s lives have been lost to wrongful convictions. The NRE website links to resources including criteria for exoneration and their data in an effort to raise awareness about this issue.
