The year 2016 saw a record 166 exonerations after wrongful convictions, 54 of those in homicide cases.
The growing trend can be seen as illustrating a criminal justice system riddled with arbitrary decision-making or as symptomatic of a system that is more and more willing to recognize its mistakes.
Experts agree that what has been studied so far in this area is the tip of an iceberg. The war on drugs, which has caused the prison population to soar over the past few decades, features vast police raids.
“We know about nearly 1,700 cases in group exonerations that are mostly drug crime frame ups,” said Samuel Gross, the author of the report. “Most of those defendants are African Americans. We believe that there are many more that we have not found, he said.
Oddly, many blacks plead guilty to crimes they did not commit: they fear going ahead with a full-blown jury trial and being punished with even more years in prison.
