"A pair of reports released Tuesday examining
wrongful convictions in the United States found that there were a record
number of exonerations in 2016 — the third such record-setting year in a
row — and that innocent black people face a raft of racial disparities
that make them more likely to wind up behind bars, and to remain there
longer than whites. Researchers at the
National Registry of Exonerations, which is run by the University of California, the University of Michigan and Michigan State, published the data. Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University
of Michigan and an author of the race study, attributed the growing
number of exonerations to increased awareness and resources, and he said
they were part of persistent pattern: the number of exonerations
climbed to 166 last year,
up from 149 the year before and more than double the number of cases in 2011. The registry has collected data on nearly 2,000 cases since 1989. Researchers found that racial disparities
disproportionately impacted black people across the three crimes they
examined — murder, sexual assault and drug charges. Innocent blacks, for
instance, were seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than
innocent whites and three-and-a-half times more likely to be convicted
of sexual assault. Once convicted of the latter, the researchers
found, wrongly convicted black people spent four-and-a-half years longer
in prison than whites. Cross-racial mis-identification was frequently
what put them there to begin with — particularly "a core problem" among
white female victims wrongly accusing black men, Gross said — but those
black men who refused to plead guilty also received longer sentences
than their white counterparts. Then, Gross added, "there was more resistance to releasing them once other evidence began to emerge."..."The 70 wrongful convictions involving official
misconduct also set a record last year. The most common form,
researchers found, involved police and prosecutors concealing evidence. There were a record number of overturned drug
cases in 2016 as well — 61, up from 43 in 2014 — with the vast majority
of them occurring in Harris County. A program there was started three
years ago to clear defendants who plead guilty to possessing illegal
substances — even though a crime lab analysis would later contradict the
original drug charge. Gross said that faulty drug testing kits were
behind those charges. Recalling a case in which kitty litter was
misidentified as cocaine, he said: "Those tests are very often totally
inaccurate."
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/number-exonerations-hits-record-third-straight-year-n729916
