According to the Innocence Project, studies estimate that anywhere between 2.3% and 5%
of prisoners in the US could be wrongfully incarcerated.
That’s as many as 100,000 innocent people behind bars.
So, why is the US convicting so many innocent people?
The Innocence Project looked at all of the cases in which a prisoner was later exonerated
of their crime due to DNA evidence.
They found that 70% of exonerated prisoners were misidentified by an eyewitness.
This is a common occurrence, as studies have shown that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.
People are also “less able to recognize faces of a different race than their own”.
So, white people are more likely to misidentify black people and vice versa.
47% of cases involved some sort of improper forensic science.
While DNA testing is reliable, other forensic methods have been questioned.
Things like “hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, firearm tool mark analysis and
shoe print comparisons” have not been as scientifically validated.
These forensic clues are not concrete evidence, like DNA, but they are often treated that
way in court.
They also found that more than a quarter of these cases involved false confessions or
incriminating statements.
In some cases, police officers or other officials lead or force defendants into false admissions
of guilt.
And then finally, 15% of these cases involved bad information provided by incentivized witnesses
- jailhouse informants or co-conspirators who provide false information to lower their
own sentence or point the blame away from themselves.
Innocent victims are usually wrongfully convicted based on by a combination of these factors.
If you’d like to hear how one inmate was exonerated after 30 years locked up, click
here now.
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