The National Registry of Exonerations, which reported that there were 87 recorded exonerations last year, said that black defendants are over-represented among the wrongfully convicted.
Of the 1,281 individual exonerations from January 1989 through December 2013, 47 percent or 598 were African American; 40 percent or 513 were white; 11 percent or 147 were Hispanic and 2 percent or 23 were Native American or Asian.
“Black defendants continue to be over-represented among exonerees, particularly in sexual assault, robbery and drug cases,” reported the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University Law School.
“As we noted last year, the disparity is greatest in sexual assault cases. Black defendants constitute 25 percent of prisoners incarcerated for rape, but 61 percent of those exonerated for such crimes.
The Exoneration Project reported that 46 percent of African Americans were exonerated for homicide; 61 percent were exonerated for sexual assault; 25 percent were exonerated for child sex abuse; 69 percent were exonerated for attempted murder; 58 percent were exonerated for robbery; 38 percent were exonerated for other violent crimes; 55 percent were exonerated for drug crimes and 59 percent were exonerated for other non-violent crimes from January 1989 through December 2013.
The Registry now lists 1,304 exonerations from 1989 to February 3, 2014. Missouri has 21 exonerations in that period, with four in St. Louis city, three in St. Louis County and one in Jefferson County.
Of the Missouri five exonerees featured on the Registry, three are black men (George Allen Jr., Robert Nelson, Reginald Griffin), one is a white man (Ryan Ferguson) and one is a white woman (Paula Hall).
George Allen, Jr. was convicted of rape and murder in St. Louis in 1983, based on a coerced false confession and forensic fraud. He was freed in 2013 after DNA testing excluded Allen as the source of semen left at the scene, and it was discovered lab reports that had been altered to hide the fact that biological evidence recovered did not match Allen’s blood type.
Robert Nelson was convicted of rape and robbery in Kansas City in 1984 and sentenced to 98 years based on the victim’s identification. Nelson was released after DNA tests requested by the Midwest Innocence Project and prosecutors excluded Nelson as the attacker and matched two other men, one of whom is serving a life sentence for a 1992 rape.
In 1983, Reginald Griffin, a Missouri prison inmate, was sentenced to death for the stabbing death of a fellow inmate. In 2011, the conviction was reversed after a critical witness recanted and it was revealed that the prosecution had concealed evidence that another inmate was the killer.
The National Registry of Exonerations noted that DNA exonerations dropped from 23 in 2005 to 18 in 2013. At the same time, the number of non-DNA exonerations rose from 34 in 2005 to 69 in 2013.
Texas, Illinois, New York, Washington and California were the leading states with exonerations in 2013. There were 13 exonerations in Texas, 9 in Illinois, 8 in New York, 7 in Washington and 6 in California.
For more information, visit http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx.
Reprinted with permission, with additional reporting, from The North Star News, www.thenorthstarnews.com.
