What Can We Do About Wrongful Convictions?
On September 19, 2022, a Baltimore City Circuit Court judge vacated the highly publicized murder conviction of Adnan Syed. The judge declared her finding that prosecutors at Syed’s 1999 trial, in violation of their legal duty, withheld exculpatory evidence that came to their knowledge before and after the trial. The decision gave prosecutors 30 days to determine whether to request a new trial or to drop charges, while requiring Syed to serve home-based detention in the meantime.
The decision gave Syed the ability to emerge from prison for the first time since his teens. Unshackled, he waved at a group of supporters as he stood on the steps of the courthouse, then left in an SUV without speaking to the throng of reporters.
A senseless tragedy, and a miscarriage of justice
Hae Min Lee was a popular student in her Baltimore high school, an athlete, and an inductee into the National Honor Society. Still months from graduation, she had already enrolled in optometry school. But in 1999, her body was discovered in a local park. She had been strangled. Syed, then 17 years old, was Lee’s ex-boyfriend, and became the leading suspect. Lee had started seeing someone else late the previous year, so jealousy and revenge were the presumed motives.
Entered into evidence was testimony from Syed’s friend and co-defendant, who claimed to have helped Syed bury Lee’s body. Phone records additionally appeared to support the friend’s claims, indicating Syed’s presence near the part of the park where Lee’s body was later found.
In 2000, a jury convicted Syed of murder in the first degree, along with kidnapping, false imprisonment, and robbery. He received a life sentence. Eighteen years later, a court of appeals vacated the conviction on the grounds of the inadequacy of his legal counsel. But the following year, the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s decision.
Then came Serial. In its first season, in 2014, the true crime investigative podcast with journalist Sarah Koenig delved into all the twists and turns of the case. In the process, Koenig and her team—aided in particular by the indefatigable pursuit of justice on the part of attorney and author Rabia Chaudry—uncovered new leads that did not point to Syed. They also found new evidence pointing to mistakes on the part of his trial attorney. All this evidence and advocacy was a big factor in the 2022 decision to vacate Syed’s conviction.
Statistics on the innocent
How often are people wrongfully convicted of crimes?
The history of the American justice system is strewn with such cases, including the conviction of the “Exonerated 5,” originally dubbed the “Central Park 5,” five teens of color wrongfully and infamously convicted in 2000 for a brutal rape. While not all these miscarriages of justice involve Black and Brown defendants, studies clearly show the racial disparities.
Black defendants are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white defendants, and the odds increase further when the victim is white. The National Registry of Exonerations, which reported this data in 2022, also notes that Black murder defendants are about 80 percent more likely to actually be innocent than others charged with the same crime. While African Americans comprise only about 13 percent of the population in the United States, they make up about 40 percent of the imprisoned population. And close to 60 percent of all those exonerated based on DNA evidence are Black.
Overall, according to the Georgia Innocence Project, some 4 to 6 percent of the people currently imprisoned in the U.S. were wrongfully convicted. In 2020, the justice system exonerated only 129 of these people. They had spent a collective more than 1,700 years of their lives behind bars.
Other statistical studies show that well over 50 percent of people exonerated in any given year were wrongly convicted due to misconduct on the part of government officials. In the case of murder exonerees in 2020, about 80 percent of the cases were marked by official misconduct.
Professional exonerators like the Innocence Project, the National Register of Exonerations, and other innocence organizations and conviction integrity units play an outsize role in helping deliver justice to numerous wrongly imprisoned people. But their work is painstaking, and often takes years or decades.
Let justice roll down
What can we as a society do, here and now, to reduce the number of wrongful convictions in the first place?
Innocence organizations point to a toxic brew of circumstances as being responsible for the bulk of wrongful convictions: misconduct on the part of police and prosecutors, poor legal representation, faulty or badly interpreted science, perjurious testimony, and plain old racism. So it’s going to be a big challenge to solve the problem with a single new law or policy.
Policy experts offer a range of ways we can change the practices of the criminal justice system for the better:
We can agree to exclude testimony from jailhouse informants, and increase access to DNA testing for post-conviction defendants.
It’s also vital that we guarantee fair and impartial justice through more consistent administration of challenges keeping racists off juries that decide the fate of defendants of color.
It’s also vital to hold prosecutors to public account when their zeal to win overtakes their professional duty to be fair. Public defenders on the losing side in wrongful convictions often cite a “win-at-all costs” attitude on the part of prosecutors as one of the biggest problems.
Speaking of public defenders, we also need to resource and compensate them better, in order to even the playing field for their clients. About 85 percent of people accused of crimes are represented by public defenders. A well-resourced public defender with sufficient time to focus on a case can be the deciding factor when it comes to bringing forth their client’s full humanity and holding prosecutors’ feet to the fire when confronted with the full range of exculpatory evidence.
We’re surely long overdue for a thorough overhaul of how we administer justice. The next innocent defendant is depending on us to do it.