How Many Innocent People are in Prison?
12.12.11
A recent Mother Jones article attempts to answer this question with help from the Innocence Project, the Center on Wrongful Convictions and experts in the field.
Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative
estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted.
In fact, since the late 1980s there have been as many as 850 exonerations nationwide, according to
University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, a leading researcher in the field. Many of them float under the radar, Gross says, unlike the highly publicized DNA exonerations.
Read the full article and see a map
of how many people have been exonerated in each state since 1989.
See how the Innocence Project has answered this question.
Browse case profiles of DNA exonerations.
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April 22, 2021 at 6:30 pm
October 6, 2020 at 10:23 am
This is incredibly ignorant. It is OK to pull somebody in for something they didn’t do and harass them because “the system gave them a chance to fight”… No it is a crime. Kidnapping is a crime. Harassment is a crime. Wrongful imprisonment is a crime. Our legal system is guilty of the crimes it is sending people to jail for. The law has been broke by the people who make it and enforce it in this country of ours. Freedom is dead.
Yes how does an individual help…. When the
system is so Pathetically Broken