A recent Mother Jones article attempts to answer this question with help from the Innocence Project, the Center on Wrongful Convictions and experts in the field. estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted.
Studies estimate that between 4-6% of people incarcerated in US prisons are actually innocent. If 5% of individuals are actually innocent, that means 1/20 criminal cases result in a wrongful conviction.
After exoneration
Miscarriages of justice occur at rates that are difficult to estimate. However, wrongful conviction rates have been placed at approximately one in 20 defendants.
Race is central to every aspect of criminal justice in the United States. The conviction of innocent defendants is no exception. Thousands of exonerations across dozens of years demonstrate that Black people are far more likely than white people to be convicted of crimes they did not commit.
The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions is 27. 92% of false confessors are men. The most common bases for exoneration were the real perpetrator was identifed (74%) or that new scientiific evidence was discovered (46%).
Law enforcement has solved countless cold cases as well as current cases based on DNA evidence. The problem arises from the fact that, like almost everything, DNA testing is not 100% reliable. A miscarriage of justice can result when someone gets wrongfully convicted based on incorrect DNA results or interpretations.
According to the Innocence Project, of the 258 DNA exonerations they have handled to date, 25% have involved a false confession.
The leading factors in wrongful convictions are: Eyewitness misidentification. False confessions. Police and prosecutorial misconduct.
Eyewitness error is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in 72% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.
The Innocence Project succinctly answers the question of which state has the most wrongful convictions (as evidenced by exonerations), and that answer is the State of Illinois.
The presumption of innocence is a fundamental principle of the criminal justice system in Queensland and in Australia. It holds that every person accused of a crime is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Domestic violence is noted as being one of the most underreported categories of crime globally.
Other leading causes of wrongful convictions include mistaken eyewitness identifications, false or misleading forensic science, and jailhouse informants. Faulty forensics also lead to wrongful convictions. Many forensic techniques aren't scientifically validated.
A type of cognitive bias that is commonly seen in wrongful conviction cases is confirmation bias — when a person selectively seeks, recalls, weights, or interprets information in ways that support their existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses.
The Innocence Project has found that 17% of its cases have been caused by false testimonies, allowing the person who gave the testimony a shorter or better sentence while the accused face harsher repercussions.
That night Phillips went out and never came home. Phillips holds one of the last photos ever taken with his daughter, Rita. It was taken in 1970. Forty-six years later, legal observers would say Richard Phillips had served the longest known wrongful prison sentence in American history.
Witnesses: If other people were present during the alleged assault, their testimony could prove your innocence. Contact them immediately and ask them to provide a written statement of what they saw or heard. Phone records: Phone records can show who you were communicating with, at what time, and for how long.
The Boorn brothers, Jesse and Stephen, were sentenced to death in Manchester, Vermont, in 1819 for the murder of their brother-in-law, Russell Colvin, who had disappeared and presumably been murdered seven years earlier. The Boorns' innocence was established in 1820 when Colvin was found alive in New Jersey.
False Confessions
One of the lessons learned from examining more than 375 DNA exonerations is that, although it may seem unimaginable, innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit for various reasons.
One of the most well-known false confession cases is the NY Central Park Jogger case. In 1989, a female jogger was found brutally attacked and raped in Central Park. The crime caused an uproar in New York City and police were under pressure to find those responsible.
Most commonly reported reasons for true confessions were the perceived proof, a need to clear one's conscience, police pressure, custodial pressure, and the hope of being released from custody (Gudjonsson et al. 2004a, b; Sigurdsson and Gudjonsson 1994; Volbert et al. 2019).
These challenges include the adequacy of population studies and testing methods, the role of human error in interpreting test results, alleged unfairness to criminal defendants and the lack of standards.