Sadly, 2015 was a record setter for injustice and police brutality in this incarceration nation.
In addition to an all-time high of 1,205 people killed by American police last year, a report published Wednesday by the National Registry of Exonerations shows a record-setting 149 wrongfully convicted people were released from American prisons in 2015 — averaging three per week.
Four out of every 10 were exonerated for murder.
“We’re entranced with a documentary (Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer’) about one possible innocence case in Wisconsin, but 58 men and women have actually been exonerated of homicide charges in 2015,” said Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and the report’s author. “Five of them had been sentenced to death. Instead of being executed, they are now free.
“Increasingly, prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys are acknowledging the systemic problem of wrongful convictions,” Gross added. “That’s a welcome change. but it’s just a start. We’ve only begun to address this problem systematically. Progress, so far, is a drop in the bucket.”
Some, however, see the nation’s record number of exonerations and mistake the report for good news. The Registry cautions us from thinking we have arrived.
“In fact, that is not our view,” wrote Gross.
“There is a growing awareness that false convictions are a substantial, widespread and tragic problem,” the report states. “The popularity of the recent Netflix documentary ‘Making a Murderer’ reflects and contributes to that process. Increasingly, Americans realize we convict innocent people of crimes on a regular basis.
“How many? We don’t know. We have reliable statistical evidence that the rate of false convictions among death sentences in the United States is about 4%,but we don’t have comparable information about non-capital convictions. The rates for other types of criminal cases could be lower or higher. But even a false conviction rate of 1% translates into tens of thousands of miscarriages of justice a year, and thousands more who were convicted in past years but remain in prison.”
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In other words, in a nation that arrests millions of people per year, it’s likely we have tens of thousands of people who have been wrongfully convicted and we’re just now getting to the point of exonerating 149 of them.
Over the past two years in Brooklyn alone, 16 people were exonerated for murders they were convicted of between 1988-1994, according to the new report.
In Houston, an astounding 73 people were exonerated by lab evidence for drug crimes that they actually pleaded guilty to in order to avoid longer jail sentences prosecutors threatened them with.
Why did so many exonerations happen in Brooklyn and Houston? Those two cities are among a small handful with active Conviction Integrity Units. These special task forces were created to give the necessary time, attention and resources to reviewing previous convictions possessing a series of red flags.
A full 75% of the homicide exonerations were found to have had official police or prosecutor misconduct, such as concealing evidence of the real criminals or allowing witnesses to testify falsely. Are those police and prosecutors going to be held liable for what they did?
The average exonerated person in America had already spent 14 brutal years behind bars before they finally found justice.
The states with the most exonerations are: Texas (54); New York (17); Illinois (13); Alaska (6); California (5); North Carolina (5); Alabama (4); Connecticut (4); Wisconsin (4); Florida (3); Pennsylvania (3); and Virginia (3).
What should come as no surprise is that more than two-thirds of the defendants exonerated in homicide cases were people of color, including 50% who were African-American.
Make no mistake about it, this system isn’t broken — it was designed to work this way.
