Report: ‘Alarming’ rates of police, prosecutor misconduct

A new, in-depth analysis on wrongful convictions put a spotlight Tuesday on “alarming” rates of police and prosecutor misconduct — one that is claiming lives.

The National Registry of Exonerations spent more than six years examining the cases of 2,400 innocent people who were exonerated from 1989 to 2019, finding that 54 percent were sent to prison because of intentional or negligent mistakes by police, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials.

In general, the more severe the crime, the higher the rate of wrongdoing, the report found.

The most common form of misconduct involved concealing evidence that could have cleared the defendant — occurring in 44 percent of the cases that led to exonerations. Next was perjury and other forms of misconduct at trial by police and prosecutors, witness tampering, the use of manipulative interrogation techniques to secure false confessions, and faking crimes, with officers planting drugs or guns on suspects or falsely claiming they had assaulted an officer.

“Official misconduct damages truth-seeking by our criminal justice system and undermines public confidence,” said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan Law Professor Emeritus and senior editor of the National Registry of Exonerations. “It steals years — sometimes decades — from the lives of innocent people.”

Gross, lead author of the report, said it is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind.

Police were slightly more likely to commit misconduct than prosecutors, in 34 percent of the cases compared with 30 percent, the report showed. In federal cases, however, prosecutors were five times as likely to commit misconduct; in federal white collar crime exonerations prosecutors committed misconduct seven times as often as police,in 65 percent of the cases compared with 9 percent.

Overall, exonerated

Black defendants were slightly more likely than white defendants to be victims of official misconduct — 57 percent to 52 percent. That difference was much larger, however, for drug crimes, 47 percent to 22 percent, and for murder cases, 78 percent to 64 percent, especially those with death sentences, 87 percent to 68 percent.