IRVINE, CA – The 2024 Annual Report conducted by The National Registry of Exoneration (NRE) provides a detailed overview of the exoneration findings from last year, explaining the technicalities of the 147 recorded exonerations.
NRE stated official misconduct occurred in at least 104 exonerations in 2024; 79 percent of the 85 homicide exonerations were marred by official misconduct.
Professional exonerators played essential roles, added NRE. Innocence organizations (IOs) took part in 53 exonerations, and Conviction Integrity Units (CIUs) helped secure 62 exonerations. IOs and CIUs worked together on 22 exonerations in 2024—63 percent of the exonerations in 2024 involved a professional exonerator.
Thirty-five percent of the 147 exonerations in 2024 were no-crime cases; those 51 exonerations included wrongful convictions for drug possession, murder, and child sex abuse, cited NRE.
NRE further detailed that 78 percent of exonerations in 2024 were people of color; nearly 60% were Black.
Exonerated persons in 2024, reported NRE, lost an average of 13.5 years to wrongful imprisonment—over 1,980 years in total, and state compensation or civil damage awards to exonerees now exceed $4.6 billion (since 1989), stated NRE.
Eighty-five people were exonerated of homicide (murder and manslaughter), NRE reported, and four exonerated had been sentenced to death.
NRE added that nine accused were exonerated of sexual offenses (sexual assault of an adult and child sexual abuse), 16 accused were exonerated for other violent crimes (assault, robbery, and attempted murder) and 37 people were exonerated of non-violent offenses.
There were 71 percent (of 104) of exonerations that had known-official-misconduct in 2024, according to NRE.
NRE said most of these cases involved more than one kind of misconduct; this included the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense, witness tampering, perjury by an official actor, knowing presentation of perjured testimony, police misconduct in interrogations, prosecutorial dishonesty in court, or forensic misconduct.
NRE stated that 26 percent of the exonerations were for convictions based, at least in part, on mistaken witness identifications, 15 percent of exonerations involved false confessions, 72 percent included perjury or other false accusations, 29 percent involved forensic evidence that was false, or misleading, and 33 percent included inadequate legal defense.
NRE stated that they published two cases, representing 54 individuals, in their Groups Registry. NRE pointed out that the exonerations were tied together by a pattern of systematic official misconduct.
The National Registry of Exonerations added 196 exonerations in 2024. NRE recorded 147 exonerations, and added 49 exonerations that happened in previous years.
NRE said it highlighted several exonerations from the past year that were remarkable accounts of persistence and determination in the face of injustice.
The National Registry of Exonerations recorded 3,646 exonerations in the United States from 1989 through the end of 2024.
In 2024, stated NRE, there were 141 exonerations in 28 states, and six from federal courts; added together, there were a total of 147 exonerations.
According to NRE, Texas had the most exonerations at 26, followed by Illinois with 20. New York and Pennsylvania each had 15, stated NRE.
A few states accounted for more than half the total of exonerations, as seen in previous years, stated NRE. Consistently, a cluster of drug crime exonerations following the discovery of police corruption drove the high numbers in Texas, explained NRE.
Of the 26 Texas exonerations, NRE specified, 17 cases were tied to the misconduct of Gerald Goines (a former narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department).
For the last six years, Illinois had held the top spot, stated NRE, and most Illinois exonerations were of drug cases involving Ronald Watts (a disgraced police sergeant).
The discovery of Watts’ corruption, explained NRE, led to the exonerations of more than 200 people who had been falsely convicted after being planted with drugs and weapons. The NRE stated that in 2024, there was only one exoneration from Watts’ case—the other 19 exonerations included murder, manslaughter, and attempted murder. Illinois had 17 exonerations from Cook County, according to NRE.
The 15 Pennsylvania exonerations were all from Philadelphia, with eight of those cases involving post-conviction work, stated NRE. and in New York, nine of the 15 exonerations were from the five boroughs of New York City.
NRE explained crimes for which people were primarily convicted consisted of violent crimes, noting, of the 147 exonerations, 58 percent were homicide cases, six percent were sex crimes, 11 percent were other violent crimes, and 25 percent were non-violent crimes.
The registry added 147 exonerations that occurred in 2024 as of March 1, 2025—about average over the last 10 years, excluding the year 2022, when they added more than 250.
The peaks are driven by clusters of drug exonerations, NRE explained, noting the biggest was in 2022, with 105 drug crime exonerations, 99 of them having taken place in Cook County, Illinois.
According to NRE, a smaller cluster of 17 occurred in Harris County, Texas, in 2024, pushing Texas to the top of the list.
NRE explained that “the last time Texas had the most exonerations in a single year was 2016. That capped a four-year period when nearly 200 (accused) were cleared of drug possession convictions after the Harris County CIU discovered that scores of people had pled guilty to drug possession before lab results came back showing that what they had possessed were not, in fact, controlled substances.”
According to NRE, drug exonerations explain much of the year-to-year variability, but murder remains the largest category of exonerations in the registry, noting murder exonerations involve higher stakes, require more time and effort to achieve, and reflect long-term trends in exonerations.
Drug-crimes convictions are the next largest group, with fewer than half as many exonerations as murders—with the pattern being far more variable, explained NRE.
Another trend is the important role that professional exonerators play in exonerations, reported NRE, stating CIUs and IOs have participated in an increasingly larger share of exonerations over the years.
And, the data suggested the increase in the number of exonerations annually over the past 10 to 15 years is driven at least in some part by the proliferation of CIUs and IOs, according to NRE.
