WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS
Patterns and Statistics
- 4-6% of All Cases End in Wrongful Convictions
- 1/20 People in Prison are Innocent
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3,491 Total Exonerations Since 1989
594 DNA Exonerations - 2,897 Non-DNA Exonerations
A Review of 2023
In 2023, there were 153 exonerations of innocent people.
- 128 were violent crimes
- 88 were homicides
- Of those 153, a total of 2,230 years in prison were served for an average of 14.6 years per case
- Nearly 84% of 2023 exonerations were people of color
Exonerations by State
RACE & WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS
Statistics of race distribution among people who were wrongfully convicted and exonerated show that there is a higher tendency of minority suspects, particularly black defendants, to be wrongfully convicted. With black Americans making up only 13% of the total population, it is disproportionate that they make up over half of the exonerations.
Practices by prosecutors contribute to this with many creating all-white juries that have been proven to convict black defendants at a higher rate than they would white defendants. This is something that is hard to prove as prosecutors can simply create other reasons for challenging the potential juror and so this continues to happen across the US.
Racism from the 20th century is also important to look at because there are still people in jail because of racially driven prosecution and prejudice in court from decades ago that are still seeking exoneration.
Gender
Socioeconomic Status
The amount of money people are able to put into legal defense has a direct correlation with their likelihood of being convicted. Because of this, people with lower socioeconomic statuses are more likely to be wrongfully convicted and are less able to have funding towards exoneration efforts. This is because of lower performance rates of the public defendants or lower level lawyers they are able to afford.
Because of this, wrongful convictions initiatives around the nation, such as the Innocence Project and the multiple other innocence project’s based around the country, work largely pro bono or based on funding from donations to fight for exonerations.