The criminal justice system is designed to ensure that guilty people are punished for their crimes and innocent people are set free, but that doesn’t happen every time. In fact, the judge and jury gets the decision wrong more often than you might think.
After reviewing DNA-based exonerations, researchers found that roughly 3 to 5 percent of capital cases (murder and rape) end with a wrongful conviction. However, Penn criminologist Charles Loeffer said there was no such estimate for less serious criminal charges, like assault, armed robbery, theft and drug possession. Loeffer and colleagues decided to formulate an estimate for the number of innocent people serving time for these types of crimes.
Researchers began by asking 3,000 individuals in a Pennsylvania state prison about their conviction. They asked each prisoner to anonymously self-report their involvement in the crime for which they were serving time. You’re probably thinking “Of course an inmate is going to deny involvement,” but researchers were pleased to see just how honest inmates were willing to be about their case.
According to the inmates, two-thirds of them took complete responsibility for their most recent crime, while another quarter took at least partial responsibility. Only eight percent of individuals maintained that they had zero involvement in their crime for which they were convicted.
Wrongful Convictions
So while eight percent maintained their complete innocence, researchers weren’t willing to just take their word for it. Individuals who maintained their innocence were given more detailed follow up questions that further sought to understand their involvement. Criminologists reviewed these responses for accuracy and compared them to administrative statistics available from the prison. Any “innocent” individual whose claims didn’t add up or could be credibly proven incorrect was removed from the review. Once everything was reviewed, criminologists were able to conclude that roughly six percent of individuals charged with these lower level crimes were actually wrongfully convicted.
“We view this as an upper-bound estimate. In other words, if people were going to be inaccurate, that would lead us to a true rate that’s lower than, rather than higher than, 6 percent,” Loeffler said. “Before we did this study, a reasonable response to the question of how many people are wrongfully convicted would be, ‘We don’t know.’ Through this work, we’ve reduced that uncertainty dramatically.”
What this means is that on the surface level, our criminal justice system convicts the right person at least 94 percent of the time. That may seem like the criminal justice system is doing its job the majority of the time, but considering there are 2.3 million prisoners in the US, that means that there are roughly 138,000 wrongfully convicted individuals behind bars.
“Some people look at this and say, ‘Only 6 percent? Alright, it’s working pretty well,’” said Loeffer. “Other people look at it and say, “6 percent? That’s a lot of people.’ Both reactions are reasonable.”
If you or someone you know has been wrongfully convicted, reach out to Appelman Law Firm. Also, if you have an upcoming court date, remember that you are more likely to be wrongfully convicted if you don’t have a defense lawyer, make sure you have representation. Call us for a free case review today.
