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Jump Links Introduction UpThe use or threat of the death penalty was a factor in more than 13% of exonerations across the United States in 2019 and nearly 95% of those cases involved some form of major misconduct, a Death Penalty Information Center analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has revealed. The DPIC review found that the death penalty played a role in at least 19 of the 143 exonerations in 2019 (13.3%) listed in the Registry’s annual exonerations report, resulting in nearly 500 years lost to wrongful incarceration. Based on the National Registry’s designation of factors contributing to the wrongful convictions, Official Misconduct and/or Perjury or False Accusation was present in all but one of the wrongful incarcerations in which the death penalty was implicated (18 of 19, or 94.7%). The prevalence of misconduct was even greater in these cases than the already high historical rate at which misconduct occurs in exonerations. A September 2020 report by the National Registry of Exonerations, Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent found that misconduct was present in more than half of all exonerations since 1989, rising to nearly three-quarters of the cases in which exonerees had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. “The numbers show that the death penalty has dangerous effects on the criminal justice system that go far beyond the already significant risk of executing innocent people,” said DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham. “Innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit to avoid the possibility of being executed. Suspects, both innocent and guilty, who are threatened with the death penalty if they do not cooperate with law enforcement provide false testimony that sends innocent people to jail, often for decades. The data suggest that the misuse of the death penalty as a coercive interrogation and plea bargaining tool poses a far greater threat to the fair administration of the criminal laws than we had previously imagined.” The 2019 Annual Report of the National Registry of Exonerations identifies three former death-row prisoners who were exonerated in 2019: Clifford Williams, Jr.; Charles Ray Finch; and Christopher Williams. Collectively, they spent 111 years wrongfully incarcerated for murders they did not commit. However, DPIC’s review of the National Registry’s data identified at least sixteen other exonerees not sentenced to death who either were wrongfully convicted after they or others associated with the case were threatened with the death penalty or had their wrongful incarcerations extended because witnesses had been threatened with the death penalty if they testified for the defense. In addition to the three death-row exonerations:
[1] Keith West, Samuel Bonner, Willie Veasy, Robert Yell. [2] Hubert Myers. [3] Dean McKee, Stanley Mozee, Ronald Stewart, Christopher Tapp, Veasy, Demond Weston (murder); James Long, James Pitts, Jr., and Michael Shelton (rape). [4] Dennis Allen, Richard Kussmaul, and McKee. [5] John Miller. Nationwide, the 143 men and women exonerated in 2019 spent a total of 1,908 years in prison, a record for any year. The 19 men whose cases involved the wrongful use or threat of the death penalty accounted for one quarter of that total, losing 480 years to wrongful incarceration. On average, the 2019 exonerees spent 13.3 years each wrongfully incarcerated. The average wrongful imprisonment of exonerees in cases involving death-penalty-related abuses was nearly double that figure, at 25.3 years — an average of more than a quarter century per person. More than half (76) of the 143 men and women exonerated across the United States in 2019 had been wrongfully convicted of homicide. All of the 19 cases DPIC identified as involving the wrongful pursuit or threatened use of the death penalty were murder cases, though not all of the exonerees were ultimately charged with or convicted of murder. Fifteen of the exonerees were convicted of some degree of murder; but one was convicted of manslaughter and three others pled guilty to rape in a rape/murder case. The Factors that Contributed to These Wrongful Convictions UpHistorically, official misconduct and perjury or false accusation have been the leading factors contributing to the wrongful conviction of innocent men and women in the United States. As of April 9, 2020, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that Perjury or False Accusation contributed to 58.5% of the 2,588 exonerations it has identified. Official Misconduct was a factor in 53.8% of the exoneration cases. No other factor came close as a contributing cause to wrongful convictions. The National Registry’s report on government misconduct, which reviewed 2,400 of those exonerations, found misconduct in 54% of all exonerations since 1989, and that misconduct tended to rise as the charges involved became more serious. Misconduct was present in 72% of the cases in which exonerees had been sentenced to death. The Registry also found that government misconduct was more likely to occur in cases involving Black defendants. Overall, 57% of Black exonerees and 52% of white exonerees had been victims of police or prosecutorial misconduct, but, the report found, “this gap is much larger among exonerations for murder (78% to 64%) — especially those with death sentences (87% to 68%).” In the 2019 exoneration cases in which police or prosecutors sought or threatened to use the death penalty, DPIC found white exonerees were victims of misconduct 75% of the time (6 of 8 cases), while all eleven Black exonerees had been victims of misconduct. Research has shown that there is a direct relationship between the seriousness of a crime and the likelihood of a miscarriages of justice. As University of Denver professors Scott Phillips and Jamie Richardson describe it in their law review article, The Worst of the Worst: Heinous Crimes and Erroneous Evidence: “the ‘worst of the worst crimes,’ produce the ‘worst of the worst evidence.’” Phillips’ and Richardson’s review of more than 1,500 cases in which convicted prisoners were later exonerated found that “as the seriousness of a crime increases, so too does the chance of a wrongful conviction.” They explain that prosecutions for the most serious crimes tend to involve the most inaccurate and unreliable evidence, and the risks are greatest in cases producing murder convictions and death sentences. “The types of vile crimes in which the state is most apt to seek the death penalty are the same crimes in which the state is most apt to participate in the production of erroneous evidence …, from false confession to untruthful snitches, government misconduct, and bad science.” DPIC’s analysis of the National Registry of Exonerations data suggests that this was again the case in 2019. Official Misconduct or Perjury or False Accusation were present in 94.7% of the 2019 exonerations in which prosecutors pursued the death penalty or police or prosecutors threatened defendants or witnesses with the death penalty if they did not confess and/or provide testimony against murder defendants or refrain from providing testimony that could exonerate a prisoner wrongfully convicted of murder. In 78.9% of the exonerations in which the death penalty was implicated, both factors were present. Perjury or False Accusation and Official Misconduct were bad in the exoneration cases in general in 2019 and were worse in murder cases than in the non-homicide exonerations. But as bad as these forms of misconduct were in murder cases as a whole, they were even worse in the exoneration cases that were capitally prosecuted or in which defendants and/or witnesses were threatened with the death penalty. From the Executive Summary to the 2019 National Registry of Exonerations Annual Report Overall, Perjury or False Accusation (P/FA) was present in 101 of the 143 exonerations (70.6%) in 2019, making it the most prevalent factor in the year’s exonerations. P/FA was more pronounced in homicide cases, where it was present 76.3% of the time (58 of 76 cases), as compared with 43 of 67 (64.2%) non-homicide cases. That figure rose again to 84.2% in cases in which the death penalty was pursued or its use was threatened (16 of 19 exonerations). Official Misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government actors — most commonly in the form of withholding exculpatory evidence — was the second most frequent contributing factor to exonerations in 2019, occurring in nearly two-thirds of all exonerations (93 of 143, or 65.0%). As anticipated, Official Misconduct was even more prevalent in wrongful homicide convictions, where it was present three-quarters of the time (57 of 76 cases, 75.0%). But the rate of Official Misconduct soared when prosecutors pursued capital prosecutions or police or prosecutors threatened suspects or witnesses with the death penalty. Official Misconduct was the single most frequent contributing factor in those cases, where it was present in 89.5% of the exonerations (17 of 19). To understand the increased risk of Official Misconduct and Perjury/False Accusation in the death-penalty-related cases, we calculated both the probability and the odds that these factors would be present in an exoneration for four classes of cases: (1) all of the 2019 exonerations; 2019 exonerations in non-homicide convictions — that is, cases in which the exoneree had been wrongfully convicted of a crime
or crimes other than murder or manslaughter; 2019 homicide exonerations; and 2019 exonerations implicating the death penalty — that is, cases in which an accused had been capitally tried or non-capital tried cases in which police or prosecutors had threatened the exoneree or a witness with the death penalty. What we found was dramatic. Official Misconduct Up
Perjury/False Accusation Up
Although every type of error or misconduct was more likely to be present in exonerations involving the use or threat of the death penalty than in other exonerations, the two areas in which the differences were greatest were wrongful convictions in which prosecutors presented false or fabricated confessions or mistaken eyewitness identifications. False or Fabricated Confessions UpTwenty-four of the 143 exonerations reported by the National Registry in 2019 involved False or Fabricated Confessions (16.8%). One-third of the false confession exonerations were cases in which an accused had been threatened with the death penalty (8 of 19 cases). False confessions were 3.26 times more likely to occur in a case in which prosecutors threatened to pursue the death penalty or police threatened suspects or witnesses with the death penalty (42.1%) than in other exoneration cases (12.9%). And if one were attempting to predict an exoneration case in which a false or fabricated confession contributed to the wrongful conviction, the odds that one would find it in a case in involving the use or threat of the death penalty were nearly five times greater (4.91) than in the other cases. Mistaken Witness Identification UpAbout one third of the National Registry’s 2019 exonerations involved Mistaken Eyewitness Identifications (48 of 143 cases, or 33.6%). However, misidentifications were a factor in more than half of the cases in which prosecutors pursued or law enforcement threatened the use of the death penalty (11 of 19 cases, or 57.9%) and were nearly twice as likely to occur (1.94) in the death penalty cases than in other exoneration cases (37 of 124 cases, 29.8%). Altogether, the odds that mistaken eyewitness identification would contribute to a wrongful conviction in the 2019 exoneration cases was nearly three-and-a-quarter times greater (3.23) in wrongful conviction cases involving the use or threat of the death penalty than in other cases.
2019 Exoneration Report: Official Misconduct and Perjury Remain Leading Causes of Wrongful Homicide Convictions The report spotlighted several 2019 exonerations linked to the misuse of the death penalty. Clifford Williams, Jr. was sentenced to death in Florida in 1976 and spent 42 years in prison before the Duval County Conviction Integrity Unit reinvestigated his case and found “no credible evidence of guilt and … credible evidence of innocence.” No physical evidence linked Williams to the crime, and witness accounts contradicted the ballistics evidence in the case. Williams’ defense counsel had presented no witnesses, ignoring 40 alibi witnesses who could have testified that Williams was at a birthday party at the time of the crime. Like the vast majority of Florida death-row exonerees, Williams’ jury had not voted unanimously for death; in fact, his trial judge overrode a jury recommendation of a life sentence. Charles Ray Finch also was sentenced to death in 1976. Finch’s case involved both leading causes of wrongful convictions: official misconduct and perjury. Police in Wilson County, North Carolina obtained witness identification of Finch through suggestive lineups and the prosecution presented false testimony linking Finch to a weapon that did not actually match the one used in the murder. Several prosecution witnesses later testified that they had been pressured into giving false testimony. The year’s third death-row exoneration, that of Christopher Williams in Pennsylvania, was the result of official misconduct and false accusation by a self-interested informant. Philadelphia prosecutors deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence. The key prosecution witness cooperated with prosecutors in exchange for avoiding capital prosecution for six different murders. Williams’ case was one of thirteen homicide exonerations in Philadelphia in 2019, and one of nine aided by investigations by the DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit. Other cases referenced in the report involved the use or threat of the death penalty:
— Robert Dunham, Executive Director Appendix A. Official Misconduct Data Up
Appendix B. Data Regarding Perjury/False Accusation Up
What is the leading cause of wrongful convictions quizlet?Eyewitness error is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in 72% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.
What is the single most controversial aspect of criminal justice and policy in Texas?Police use of force is one of the most controversial aspects of law enforcement. Which of the following are recent issues concerning policing in Texas? Few officers face consequences after police shootings.
What is the single most controversial aspect of criminal justice?The death penalty remains one of the most controversial aspects of the American criminal justice system.
Which of the following statements about Texas and wrongful conviction rates is accurate?Which of the following statements about Texas and wrongful convictions rates is accurate?. Texas has more verified wrongful convictions than any other state in the United States.
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