Police or prosecutor misconduct is at root of half of cases, study finds
Official misconduct played a role in the criminal convictions of more than half of innocent people who were later exonerated, according to a new report by a registry that tracks wrongful convictions.
According to the report, by the National Registry of Exonerations, official misconduct contributed to false convictions in 54% of exonerations, usually with more than one type of misconduct. Overall, men and Black exonerees “were modestly more likely to experience misconduct,” although there were larger differences by race when it came to drug crimes and murder.
The report comes at a time of reckoning for the American criminal justice system as nationwide civil unrest against racism and police brutality continue.
“Official misconduct damages truth- seeking by our criminal justice system and undermines public confidence,” Samuel Gross, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Michigan and the report’s lead author, said in a statement Tuesday.
“It steals years — sometimes decades — from the lives of innocent people,” said Gross, senior editor of the registry. “The great majority of wrongful convictions are never discovered, so the scope of the problem is much greater than these numbers show.”
The study, which is based on 2,400 exonerations recorded in the registry from 1989 until early 2019, found that prosecutors and police officers committed misconduct at comparable rates ( 30% and 34%).
In federal cases, however, prosecutors “committed misconduct more than twice as often as police,” especially in federal whitecollar cases in which they “committed misconduct seven times as often as police,” according to the report.
The report details the different types of misconduct that can occur at different stages of a case. Nearly all of the official misconduct identified falls into five general categories: witness tampering, misconduct in interrogations, fabricating evidence, concealing exculpatory evidence and misconduct at trial.
Overall, the study found that exonerated Black defendants “were slightly more likely than white defendants to be victims of official misconduct” by a margin of 57% to 52%.
The disparity grew when it came to drug crimes ( 47% to 22%) and for murder cases ( 78% to 64%).
In exonerations involving death sentences, there was misconduct in 87% of the cases involving Black defendants compared with 68% for white defendants.
On Tuesday, Joel Feinman, chief public defender in Pima County, Ariz., which includes Tucson, called the report “one of the least surprising things read this morning.”
Feinman said that prosecutorial misconduct, which was detailed in the report, rarely garnered “the attention it deserves.”
“As few police officers as there are who are arrested and convicted of official misconduct, there are almost no prosecutors” who face such consequences, Feinman said, adding, “I’ve never heard of any prosecutor being arrested for misconduct, and almost no prosecutors are fired or disbarred for misconduct.”
The new report follows a 2017 study by the registry that found that Black people were more likely to be wrongfully convicted than their white counterparts and more likely to spend more time in prison before being exonerated.
Kalfani Turè, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Quinnipiac University and a former police officer, said Tuesday that the new report reinforced “what we know and understand, or we suspect, about race and policing and also prosecutorial misconduct.”
Turè, who is also the senior fellow of the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale, said the report was a tough condemnation of the criminal justice system, and it supported the Black Lives Matter critique that the system itself, from the point of entry with law enforcement officers to encounters with prosecutors, is rife with corruption, “and it seems to be of the racist sort.”
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