Bulletin: National Registry of Exonerations: Part Five; The Huffington Post takes on the recently released report which concludes that: "A record number of people were exonerated in 2015 for crimes they didn’t commit" - and observes that,"Making A Murderer" isn't just a problem in Manitowoc, Wisconsin."..."Many of last year's exonerations involved flawed or invalid forensic evidence. According to the Innocence Project, improper forensic science is a leading cause of wrongful conviction. Too often, the group says, forensic experts speculate when they testify, asserting conclusions that stretch the science. Further, some forensic techniques aren't backed by research, but are nevertheless presented to juries as fact. And there are honest mistakes. The FBI has admitted that from 1972 to 1999, almost every examiner in the bureau's elite forensics unit gave flawed testimony in nearly every trial in which they presented evidence."

"The Netfilx hit true-crime series “Making a Murderer” leaves many people wondering: Just how common is the story of a wrongful conviction in America’s criminal justice system? Too common, according a new report that tracks exonerations. Researchers found that 149 people were cleared in 2015 for crimes they didn't commit -- more than any other year in history, according to a report published Wednesday by the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School. By comparison, 139 people were exonerated in 2014. The number has risen most years since 2005, when 61 people were cleared of crimes they didn't commit.  “Historically, this is a very large number for a type of event that we’d like to think almost never happens or just doesn’t happen,” Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor who helped write the report, told The Huffington Post. The men and women who were cleared last year had, on average, served 14.5 years in prison. Some had been on death row. Others were younger than 18 when they were convicted or had intellectual disabilities. All had been swept into a justice system that's supposed to be based on the presumption of innocence, but failed. The high number of exonerations shows widespread problems with the system and likely “points to a much larger number of false convictions” that haven't been reversed, the report said. “That there is an impetus at all to address the underlying problems that create false convictions is of course good news,” Gross said. “But the other side is equally important, probably more so: When you see this many exonerations, that means there is a steady underlying problem. We now know that this happens on a regular basis.”........."Many of last year's exonerations involved flawed or invalid forensic evidence. According to the Innocence Project, improper forensic science is a leading cause of wrongful conviction. Too often, the group says, forensic experts speculate when they testify, asserting conclusions that stretch the science. Further, some forensic techniques aren't backed by research, but are nevertheless presented to juries as fact. And there are honest mistakes. The FBI has admitted that from 1972 to 1999, almost every examiner in the bureau's elite forensics unit gave flawed testimony in nearly every trial in which they presented evidence. Forensic fields like ballistics, bloodstain pattern identification and footprint and tire print analysis, have been “long accepted by the courts as largely infallible,” Kozinski said in his paper, arguing that the techniques should be viewed with skepticism." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exonerations-2015_us_56ac0374e4b00b033aaf3da9