Source: The University of Michigan Law School
The University of Michigan Law School released an analysis from the National Registry of Exonerations that found that while African Americans only make up 13 percent of America’s population, the majority of those who are wrongfully convicted for serious crimes and later exonerated are African American.
Data shows that African Americans made up nearly 50 percent of those who were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated. Of 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, African Americans made up 47 percent of those cases.
In addition, African Americans made up the vast majority of the 1800 individuals who were framed and convicted in several “large-scale police scandals”, and later exonerated in “group exonerations.”
The analysis examined wrongful convictions in cases of murder, sexual assault and drug crimes – the three areas with the largest number of wrongful convictions and exonerations.
The anlysis reports that innocent black individuals are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted in murder cases than innocent white people, and on average they spend three years longer in prison before they are exonerated.
Overall, the prison sentences for black people who were wrongfully convicted of sexual assault were much longer than those of innocent white people who were convicted.
For drug crimes, innocent black people were 12 times more likely to be convicted than innocent white people, even though data indicates that white and black people use drugs at the same rate.
The core causes of these wrongful convictions that more harshly affect black people include racial discrimination in the form of institutional discrimination or explicit racism, systematic racial profiling, and many cases of mistaken identification of a black assailant by white victims.
Read more about the study in this PDF document.