U.S. Prisoners Have Lost a Combined 20,000 Years of Life to False Convictions
April 11th, 2019Via: Reason:
In 2018 alone, wrongly convicted prisoners lost more than 1,600 years of life behind bars.
That’s a new record, according to the annual report from The National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks all exonerations from 1989 onward. In 2018, 151 people were freed from serving sentences for crimes they did not commit. They had served 1,639 years altogether, an average of about 11 years per person.
Another record set last year is also worth our attention: More of these exonerations are happening in cases where misconduct by officials played a role. The report documents official misconduct in at least 107 exonerations last year. Official misconduct played a role in 80 percent of the 54 homicide cases in 2018 in which the person convicted was subsequently exonerated.
