Race and Wrongful Conviction
Race and Wrongful Conviction
Innocence Project Co-founder Barry Scheck (left) with John Nolley (right) at Mr. Nolley's hearing on May 17, 2016 in Forth Worth, Texas. (Image: Ron Jenkins)
Persistent implicit and explicit racial bias in our criminal legal system has resulted in a disproportionate rate of wrongful conviction cases among people of color. Though Black people account for just 13.6% of the U.S. population, nearly 60% of the people the Innocence Project has helped to free or exonerate since 1992 are Black.
These biases show up in many ways in wrongful conviction cases.
Cross-racial eyewitness identifications are particularly unreliable and contribute to many wrongful convictions as people are more likely to misidentify people of a different race. And poor police practices during eyewitness identification procedures can further increase the likelihood of people of color being wrongly convicted. In fact, intentionally suggestive witness identifications occur twice as frequently in the cases of Black and Latinx exonerees as they do in the cases of white exonerees.
Pretrial decisions also impact the likelihood of wrongful convictions for people of color. Black and Latinx people accused of crimes are historically more likely to be detained pretrial, putting their jobs, housing, and families at risk. As a result, they may be more likely to accept plea bargains in order to be released more quickly from pretrial detention, despite being innocent.
At trial, poor jury diversity increases the likelihood of wrongful conviction. Poor diversity results from a combination of non-representative juror pool lists, the additional barriers to juror service people of color encounter, legal standards allowing jurors to be excluded based on viewpoints correlated to race, and prosecutors intentionally striking people of color from juries. All-white or nearly all white juries — which are common in criminal cases around the country — have been shown to spend less time deliberating, be less skilled at accurately assessing the reliability of evidence, and be more likely to apply racial stereotypes in decision-making than diverse juries.
Racial disparity persists after a conviction, too. For instance, wrongfully convicted Black people take an average of three years longer than white people to be exonerated in murder cases. Some of this delay can be attributed to official misconduct, which is prevalent in the cases of Black exonerees, but in many cases is due to evidence that remained hidden for decades.
The Innocence Project is committed to addressing the disproportionate and unjust treatment that increases the likelihood of wrongful conviction among people of color by:
- strengthening police and prosecutorial accountability
- ensuring that interrogations are recorded
- improving lineup protocols
- requiring prosecutors to timely provide crucial evidence to defense counsel
- Regulating the use of jailhouse informants
- sharpening forensic science practices
Innocence Project Co-founder Barry Scheck (left) with John Nolley (right) at Mr. Nolley's hearing on May 17, 2016 in Forth Worth, Texas. (Image: Ron Jenkins)
