Texas Remains
Leader in Exonerations of Wrongfully Convicted
By Derek Gilna
A new
report by a national prisoner-rights organization says that once again the
state of Texas led the nation in
2013 in exonerations, with 13 cases, and Illinois
and New York were not far behind
with 9 and 8, respectively. Although
this is the highest figure in 25 years according to available data, it still
represents only the known or acknowledged cases where defendants were
wrongfully convicted.
This
dubious distinction comes into sharper focus, when you consider that over 1
million criminal cases are processed in Texas
every year, and shows there is still much to be done, a fact acknowledged by
Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County
Attorneys Association.
Exoneration
figures have been tracked for the past several years by the authors of the new
report, the National Registry of Exonerations, a program formally launched in
2012 by two U.S.
law schools, the University of Michigan
and Northwestern Law
Schools. The group’s most recent study shows that
nationwide 85 of the wrongfully-convicted were cleared and released in the past
year. According to the same report, the
figure has steadily increased in the past several years, and totals 1309 since
records began to be compiled in
1989. Sadly, the average period of
wrongful incarceration in those cases averaged 12 years.
According
to the Registry, in the past 25 years over 60% of wrongful convictions were as
a result of official misconduct, either by the police or prosecutor, that 17%
of those exonerations were of people who had pleaded guilty, rather than face
the uncertainty of trial and a long sentence.
The study also claimed that most confessions occurred as a result of
abusive or coercive police interrogations.
The editor
of the Registry and co-author of the report, Samuel Gross, said, “There are
many false convictions that we don’t know about. The exonerations we know about are only the
tip of the iceberg.”
Rebecca
Bernhardt, policy director of the Texas Defender Service, agreed, but also
noted that there was a positive trend in that an increasing number of
exonerations occurred in cases other than murder and sexual assault, where DNA
was not a factor. She also commented on
the necessity of competent legal counsel in all criminal cases, saying that
“inadequate legal defense” was a factor in four the 13 exonerations highlighted
in the report: “Every time the court doesn’t give you the resources you need
for investigations, you lose the tools necessary to prove your client either
wasn’t guilty or deserves mercy.”
State Sen.
Rodney Ellis of Texas said that
exonerations were a “shameful category” for Texas
to lead the nation. “Unfortunately, in
everyday Texas, quality of justice
is too often contingent on your wealth and the attorney you can afford,” he said.
He might as well have been speaking for every defendant in the entire
country.
One
positive trend is that many district attorneys and states attorneys have
created internal departments to actively review previous convictions in
response to allegations of wrongful convictions. We can only hope that this trend continues to
accelerate.
