As of March 26, we're $27,100 in the red for the quarter. Donate here to support this vital work
Subscribe here and join over 13,000 subscribers to our free weekly newsletter

A record number of people convicted of crimes were exonerated last year
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post


Washington Post, February 3, 2016
Posted: February 14th, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/02/0...

There were 149 people exonerated in the United States last year after being wrongly convicted of crimes. More than a third of the people exonerated were convicted of murder, says a report released Wednesday by the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law. All of the people exonerated last year ... had served an average of more than 14 years in prison. Five of the people who were exonerated had been sentenced to death. All told, the National Registry says it has logged 1,733 exonerations in the country since 1989. Not long ago, any exoneration we heard about was major news, the report stated. Now its a familiar story. We average nearly three exonerations a week, and most get little attention. There are also more exonerations in cases involving false confessions or guilty pleas than there used to be. In four of 10 exonerations last year, the people had pleaded guilty, largely in cases involving charges of drug possession. About a third of all exonerations last year involved these drug possession cases. A remarkable number of these cases occurred in just one place: Harris County, Tex., home to Houston. The registrys report described how the Harris County District Attorneys office had investigated cases after noticing a number of people who pleaded guilty to possessing illegal drugs, only for a crime lab - sometimes months or years later - to reveal that the materials these people had were not drugs after all.

Note: Most false convictions never see the light of the day. A detailed report by forensics expert John Kelly and former FBI chief scientist Dr. Frederick Whitehurst reveals "a drug testing regime of fraudulent forensics used by police, prosecutors, and judges." And recently the FBI was found to have faked an entire branch of forensic science. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison system corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


Latest News


Key News Articles from Years Past