More than 2,000 wrongfully convicted people exonerated in 23 years, researchers say
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/21/more-than-2000-wrongfully-convicted-people-exonerated-in-23-years-researchers-say/?hpt=hp_t2
Sure, the overall number, as a percentage, is quite low, but consider that these are not the _suspected_ cases of wrongful convictions, but the ones actually proven in court resulting in the release of the wrongly convicted. Then there are the several (at least) cases of someone getting executed where there is overwhelming evidence of their innocence.
What is really interesting (scarey) to me is the breakdown on what caused the wrongful convictions:
Mistaken identity is by far the worst offender (I talk about the uselessness of human observation capability here). Rather remarkably to me the next worse is perjury. _Those_ people should be in jail, why doesn’t that ever seem to happen? The crux to me, though, are the very high numbers for official misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct is a huge problem for me, not the least because even when ‘convicted’ a prosecutor gets basically no punishment at all (see the asshole Mike Nifong for example). Even at its peak, bad forensics resulted in ‘only’ 37% of the cases. I strongly suspect that the rather low percentage of false confessions has nothing to do with the number of false confessions as it is well known that it is near impossible to get any judge to reconsider your case if you made a sworn confession, no matter how badly beaten you were to get it.
You can read the whole report here (I haven’t): Full PDF of Report.
The registry database is here.
