Floyd Bledsoe, left, was exonerated last year after spending more than 15 years in prison on a murder charge. (photo: Chris Neal/Topeka Capital-Journal/AP)
Convicted
of Murder - Including 5 on Death Row - Were Exonerated Last Year
By Mark Berman, The
Washington Post
03 February 16
There
were 149 people exonerated in the United States last year after being
wrongly convicted of crimes, a tally that included dozens convicted of murder
and an uptick in people who had pleaded guilty or falsely confessed, according
to a new report.
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. A copy of this report was reviewed by The Post before publication.
All of
the people exonerated last year were exonerated in more than half of the states
in the country and, before being cleared, had served an average of more than 14
years in prison. Five of the people who were exonerated had been sentenced to
death.
The
number of people exonerated in 2015 broke a record the organization announced
earlier, when it reported that 125 people were exonerated of crimes.
All
told, the National Registry says it has logged 1,733 exonerations in the
country since 1989. While exonerations involving DNA may grab more
attention, they accounted for a little less than a fifth of last year’s
exonerations and about a quarter of all the exonerations the registry has
logged.
The
growing frequency with which people have been exonerated of crimes comes
amid a push to reform the country’s criminal justice
system, an effort that spans political parties and follows years of
harsh sentencing and explosive growth in the country’s
incarcerated populations. It also means that each exoneration is
less of a news event, the authors of the report noted.
“Not
long ago, any exoneration we heard about was major news,” the report stated.
“Now it’s a familiar story. We average nearly three exonerations a week, and
most get little attention.”
The
report attributes this surge, in part, to more prosecutors working
to revisit convictions. (In one noteworthy case from 2014, a Texas man was
exonerated through testing he didn’t realize was taking place.)
In addition, the report says 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. More than a quarter of all exonerations last year
involved people in Harris County who had pleaded guilty to drug possession,
only to be cleared last year.
The
registry’s report described how the Harris County District Attorney’s 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.
Some of the people who wound up pleading guilty likely agreed to plea bargains
to avoid long prison terms, the report noted. (Quite a few things can get mistaken for drugs,
it turns out.)
In some
cases last year, former inmates who had been exonerated before last year
received compensation in 2015. Ricky Jackson, who spent nearly four decades
behind bars in Ohio, was awarded more than $1 million by a
judge. Two half-brothers in North Carolina had been released in
2014, but they could only be compensated last year after Gov. Pat McCroy (R) completed a lengthy review process and
formally pardoned them.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
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