3,400 innocent people have served 29,000 years in prison

According to the most recent reports, over 3,400 innocent people have been exonerated of their criminal convictions in U.S. courts since 1989.

Collectively, these wrongfully convicted people served 29,500 years behind bars before they were released.

Founded in 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations has compiled detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989 — cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

Though fewer than half the wrongfully imprisoned receive compensation for the years they spend behind bars, exonerations are proving to be costly to tax payers.

“Governments paid more than $2.9 billion in compensation, but more than half of those exonerated received nothing,” reported the registry.

Eleven of those exonerations occurred in Colorado and that group served 87 years in prison. Of the 3,400 exonerations nationwide, 395 are described as “Latinx” people. Latinx is a term for Chicanos, Hispanics, Mexican-Americans, Spanish-speaking, and Latin Americans living in the United States.

The statistics are alarming enough, but now researchers are finding that more than 40 percent of all known exonerations were for what they call “no-crime.” The percent of no-crime exonerations has jumped in recent years.

A no-crime is a crime that never happened, or if it did happen, was not a crime.

“These cases include convictions for child abuse where an alleged victim later recants and says the abuse didn’t happen, murder convictions where the deaths were accidents — such as when fires resulting in deaths were mischaracterized as arson based on misleading forensic evidence — and convictions for drug possession where corrupt police officers planted the evidence,” reads the report.

Of the 233 exonerations in 2022, 59% were cases in which no crime occurred. These 137 exonerations include wrongful convictions for drug possession, murder, and child sex abuse, according the National Registry of Exonerations 2022 annual report.

The focus on no-crime exonerations is in part in response to Montclair State University Professor Jessica S. Henry’s published report: Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened.

Based on her study of 2,468 cases the National Registry of Exonerations had identified as of June 20, 2019, Henry wrote: “Despite all that I know about wrongful convictions, I was shocked to learn that nearly one-third of all known exonerations involve people wrongfully convicted of crimes that never happened. Unlike the popular understanding of a wrongful conviction, where the wrong person was convicted of a crime committed by someone else, no-crime wrongful convictions involve innocent people convicted of crimes that did not happen in the first place.

A disproportionate number of no-crime exonerations include female defendants. This is true for both violent and nonviolent crimes. Nine percent of all cases, but 16 percent of no-crime cases, have female exonerees.

Sadly, Chicanos and other Latinx people are more vulnerable to be wrongfully convicted in the first place, according a recent study published in the UCLA Law Review. “Innocent Latinx people are uniquely vulnerable to wrongful conviction because of concerns over immigration status,” the study found. “Innocent Latinx immigrants are more vulnerable to pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit under threat of deportation and law enforcement officers have used witnesses’ immigration statuses to manipulate their testimony.

For many, language is a barrier. Many Latinx people speak enough English to get by, but don’t considered themselves proficient. Often the first “interpreters,” a suspect encounters is a Spanish-speaking officer with little or no training as an interpreter. As a result, Latinx people can be more vulnerable to false confessions.

“About 40 percent of Latinx exonerees who falsely confessed to crimes said that they ‘did not fully understand spoken English,’ according to the study published in the UCLA Law Review.

Poverty is another reason Latinx people are at a disadvantage in the courts. Nearly 1 in 5 Hispanic people in the U.S. lives in poverty, a rate 6% higher than the national average.

People living in poverty who are wrongly accused of crimes are less likely to be able to afford the help they need and less likely to have the resources needed to adequately investigate their cases, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

Sources:
The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.
The Innocence Project is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.