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Study Shows Record Number Of Criminal Exonerations
March 19, 2014 posted by Steve Brownstein
The number of exonerations of people wrongfully convicted of a crime in the United States rose to a record 87 last year — that’s 87 people who served time in prison for a crime they did not commit. The previous record was 83 in 2009.
Further, a fifth of those people had pleaded guilty to the charges against them, often to receive a lesser sentence, and sometimes due to police coercion and fear.
The report was released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law.
Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, told Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson that while it is a record number, it’s still a “very small number” of people.
“The great majority of people who are innocently convicted are never exonerated because they are never discovered,” he said.
