A record number of people were exonerated in 2015, according to a new report that said moves to clear people of criminal convictions has been on the rise since 2005.
The National Registry of Exonerations released a report showing that 149 people were exonerated last year, counted in 29 states, the District of Columbia, federal courts and Guam. The report said those people spent 14 and a half years in prison on average.
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By comparison, 139 people were exonerated in 2014, and the number has been increasing since 2005, when 61 people were cleared of criminal charges.
The uptick in exonerations over the years “speaks to the need to may more attention to wrongly convicting people of crimes,” Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor who helped write the report, told the Washington Examiner.
Gross also pointed to the work done by conviction integrity units, which are part of prosecutorial offices that work to prevent, identify and correct false convictions.
A record number 58 exonerations took place in 2015 by these CIU units. Nearly half of them came from the Harris County, Texas office and almost 90 percent of those CIU-exonerations between 2003 to 2015 occurred in four counties.
The report also found a record 58 defendants were exonerated in homicide cases, and more than two-thirds of those were minorities. Of the 47 defendants exonerated of drug possession last year, also a record, 42 of them had pleaded guilty in Harris County, Texas in Houston.
The report also found that 27 of the exonerations were for convictions based on false confessions, and more than 80 percent of them were in homicide cases and mostly by defendants who were under 18, mentally handicapped or both.
“The exonerations show we have to recognize a serious problem… It’s a start, but only a start,” Gross said. “This is just the beginning of stopping wrong convictions.”
Since 1989, the National Registry of Exonerations has recorded 1,733 known exonerations. Since 2011, the annual number of exonerations has more than doubled, and the United States now averages nearly three exonerations per week.
Read the full report here.
