1. (2022) https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race%20Report%20Preview.pdf
1.1. Executive Summary
1.1.1. Introduction
1.1.1.1. Black people are 13.6% of the American population but 53% of the 3,200 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations. Judging from exonerations, innocent Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes.
1.1.1.2. For drug crimes, the preliminary sorting that increases the number of convictions of innocent Black suspects is racial profiling. In addition, the Registry lists 17 “Group Exonerations” including 2,975 additional wrongfully convicted defendants, many of whom were deliberately framed and convicted of fabricated drug crimes in large-scale police scandals. The overwhelming majority are Black.
1.1.1.3. For both murder and sexual assault, there are preliminary investigative issues that increase the number of innocent Black suspects: for murder, the high homicide rate in the Black community; for rape, the difficulty of cross-racial eyewitness identification. For both crimes, misconduct, discrimination and racism amplify these initial racial discrepancies.
1.1.2. Murder
1.1.2.1. Innocent Black people are about seven-and-a-half times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. That applies equally to those who are sentenced to death and those who are not.
1.1.2.2. A major cause of this disparity is the high homicide rate in the Black community.
1.1.2.3. In addition, Black people who are convicted of murder are about 80% more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers.
1.1.2.4. Part of that disparity is tied to the race of the victims. About 13% of murders by Black people have white victims, but twice as many—26% of innocent Black murder exonerees— were convicted of killing white people.
1.1.2.5. The convictions that led to murder exonerations with Black defendants were almost 50% more likely to include misconduct by police officers than those with white defendants.
1.1.2.6. On average Black murder exonerees spent three years longer in prison before release than white murder exonerees.
1.1.2.7. The number of murder exonerations has been increasing, and many of the recent exonerees are Black murder defendants who spent decades in prison. Most of these long-serving Black murder defendants were exonerated by a handful of big-city prosecutorial conviction integrity units (CIUs).
1.1.2.8. Many of the convictions of Black murder exonerees were influenced by racial discrimination, from unconscious bias and institutional discrimination to explicit racism.
1.1.2.9. Most innocent defendants who are convicted of crimes are not exonerated. Judging from the rate of false conviction among death sentences, at least several thousand defendants have been falsely convicted of murder in America in the past 40 years. Judging from the exonerations that have occurred, more than half of them were Black
1.1.3. Sexual Assault
1.1.3.1. Innocent Black people are almost eight times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of rape. A prisoner serving time for sexual assault is more than three times more likely to be innocent if he is Black than if he is white
1.1.3.2. The major cause of this huge racial disparity is the high danger of misidentification of Black suspects by white victims of violent crimes.
1.1.3.3. Assaults on white women by Black men are a small minority of all sexual assaults in the United States, but nearly half of sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentifications that led to exoneration.
1.1.3.4. Some of the misidentifications were obtained by deliberately tainted identification procedures, and Black men are also overrepresented in rape exonerations without misidentifications.
1.1.3.5. A substantial number of the convictions that led to rape exonerations of Black defendants were marred by implicit biases, racially tainted official misconduct and, in some cases, explicit racism.
1.1.3.6. Black exonerees spent, on average, more than four years longer in prison before exoneration than their white counterparts
1.1.3.7. Exonerations of misidentified rape defendants are much less common than they used to be. There have been only two from rape convictions in the last 12 years. That’s because DNA testing is now routinely used to determine the identity of rapists before trial.
1.1.4. Drug Crimes
1.1.4.1. 69% percent of drug crime exonerees are Black and 16% are white. That means that innocent Black people are 19 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent whites - despite the fact that white and Black Americans use illegal drugs at similar rates
1.1.4.2. Because drug crimes are almost never reported to police, the police choose who to pursue for drug offenses—and they choose to stop, search and arrest Black people several times more often than whites - Racial profiling.
1.1.4.3. Most false drug crime convictions involve comparatively low level charges and sentences that rarely attract the effort necessary to obtain exonerations. Almost all the erroneous drug convictions we know about are in a single cluster in Harris County, Texas (Houston), where a unique practice of testing alleged drugs after defendants pled guilty led to 157 exonerations; 62% of the exonerees are Black in a county with 20% Black residents.
1.1.4.4. These convictions are errors—mostly caused by defective field drug tests—but most are not innocent errors. Most Black exonerees were stopped and searched—and subjected to the risk of these errors—because of their race.
1.1.4.5. Dozens of groups of innocent defendants who were deliberately framed by police officers who planted drugs on them. Almost all are Black people or other racial or ethnic minorities. So far, we list 259 individual exonerees who were convicted of these fabricated drug crimes, primarily in three group exonerations; 87% of them are Black.
1.1.4.6. Guilty or innocent, drug law enforcement always focuses disproportionately on Black people.
1.2. Misconduct
1.2.1. misconduct occurs