Nearly three-quarters of the exonerated who falsely confess have been found to be mentally ill or intellectually disabled
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThere was just one problem: he didn’t do it. A follow-up investigation in 2019 found a litany of red flags in how the case was handled, including an unrecorded police interrogation and the fact that Mr Calhoun, who was found to be cognitively deficient, had been questioned without a lawyer present. On April 27th, after 15 years behind bars, he was exonerated.
He was not alone. The government does not record figures, but in 2012 a pair of professors founded the National Registry of Exonerations to keep track. It counted 161 exonerations last year, up more than sixfold compared with 1989, when there were just 24 . These shed light on weak spots in America’s justice system.
An exoneration “doesn’t just happen on its own”, says Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State University, who runs the. A crucial development has been the rise of “professional exonerators”. These were spurred by improvements intesting, which spread public awareness of mistakes, and can take two forms. First, advocacy groups such as the Innocence Project play a role in lobbying for individual cases.
Official misconduct is the main reason behind most exonerations: it played a role in 102 of the 161 cases last year. In 2012, for example, Ronald Watts, a Chicago police sergeant, was arrested for stealing federal funds from an undercoverinformant. It gradually emerged that he had been planting drugs and extorting victims over the course of a decade, stitching them up on bogus charges if they refused to pay.
Mistaken eyewitness identification accounts for about a third of exonerations. Misleading forensic evidence is relatively rare, responsible for roughly 20% of wrongful convictions. Other factors include perjury and, as in Mr Calhoun’s case, false or coerced confessions. .has recorded more than 3,000 exonerations in America, amounting to 27,080 years of lost freedom. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
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