Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent The Role of Prosecutors, Police and Other Law Enforcement Samuel R. Gross, Senior Editor,
[email protected] Maurice J. Possley, Senior Researcher Kaitlin Jackson Roll, Research Scholar (2014-2016) Klara Huber Stephens, Denise Foderaro Research Scholar (2016-2020) NATIONAL REGISTRY OF EXONERATIONS SEPTEMBER 1, 2020 Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent The Role of Prosecutors, Police and Other Law Enforcement National Registry of Exonerations Newkirk Center for PageScience i • National & Society Registry • University of Exonerations of California • September Irvine 1, • 2020 Irvine, California 92697 University of Michigan Law School • Michigan State University College of Law For Denise Foderaro and Frank Quattrone Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent The Role of Prosecutors, Police and Other Law Enforcement Page ii • National Registry of Exonerations • September 1, 2020 Preface This is a report about the role of official misconduct in the conviction of innocent people. We discuss cases that are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, an ongoing online archive that includes all known exonerations in the United States since 1989, 2,663 as of this writing. This Report describes official misconduct in the first 2,400 exonerations in the Registry, those posted by February 27, 2019. In general, we classify a case as an “exoneration” if a person who was convicted of a crime is officially and completely cleared based on new evidence of innocence. A more detailed definition appears here. The Report is limited to misconduct by government officials that contributed to the false convictions of defendants who were later exonerated—misconduct that distorts the evidence used to determine guilt or innocence.