The National Registry of Exonerations recorded 125 exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in 2014, the first time the Registry found more than 100 exonerations in one year, according to a recent report that analyzes trends in exonerations and details the work of the nation’s 15 prosecutorial Conviction Integrity Units. The Registry credits Conviction Integrity Units for contributing to the spike in exonerations: 34 more than the previous record of 91 exonerations in 2013.
“The big story for the year is that more prosecutors are working hard to identify and investigate claims of innocence. And many more innocent defendants were exonerated after pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit,” said University of Michigan Law School Professor Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and the author of the report.
The states with the most exonerations in 2014 are Texas (39), New York (17), Illinois (7), Michigan (7), Ohio (6), North Carolina (4), Louisiana (3), Maryland (3), Oregon (3), Pennsylvania (3), and Tennessee (3). The states with the most recorded exonerations are not necessarily those where most false convictions have occurred.
Much of the increase in the total number of exonerations is due to 33 exonerations in drug cases in Harris County (Houston), Texas. In mid-2014, the Harris County District Attorney’s Post Conviction Review Section centralized and prioritized its review of cases in which crime lab analyses of the “drugs” defendants pled guilty to possessing was negative for the presence of illegal substances.
The trends in 2014 reflect several long-term trends in exonerations that are expected to continue:
• 67 of the 125 known exonerations in 2014 – 54% – were obtained at the initiative or with the cooperation of law enforcement. This is the highest number of exonerations with law enforcement support in a single year. Almost three quarters of those exonerations, 49 out of 67, were the work of Conviction Integrity Units.
• 47 of the 125 defendants who were exonerated in 2014 – 38% – were exonerated for crimes to which they had pled guilty, another record number. Almost all exonerations for drug crimes in 2014 were for convictions based on guilty pleas.
• Non-DNA exonerations continue to rise. The number of exonerations that did not rely on DNA rose to an all-time high of 103, a higher number than all exonerations, with and without DNA, in any single previous year.
• The proportion of exonerations in the Registry that do not involve murder or sexual assault continues to steadily grow. The proportion of non-homicide, non-sex crime exonerations rose from 25% of all cases in the earliest 5-year period covered by the Registry (1989 through 1993) to 34% for the most recent 5-year period (2010 through 2014).
• Nearly half of the known exonerations in 2014 – 46% – were cases where no crime in fact occurred. That is true of all the drug crime exonerations – they were based on lab tests that showed that the substances seized from the defendants contained no illegal drugs – as well as cases of accidents that were misinterpreted as crimes, assaults that were concocted by the supposed victims, and others.
“Judging from known exonerations in 2014, the legal system is increasingly willing to act on innocence claims that have often been ignored: those without biological evidence or with no perpetrator who can be identified because in fact no crime was committed; cases with comparatively light sentences; and judgments based on guilty pleas by defendants who accepted plea bargains to avoid pre-trial detention and the risk of harsher punishment after trial,” the report states.
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