14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study comes to contradict the long-term belief of legal scholars, who say that the actual number of people convicted of crimes while being innocent is unknowable. The new paper, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and authored by researchers at the University of Michigan, argues that at least 2 to 3 percent of death sentences, handed out since 1973, were wrongful, leading to the killing of innocent men and women.
"The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations of falsely convicted defendants is that there are many other false convictions that we have not discovered," says Samuel Gros, a University of Michigan Thomas and Mabel Long professor of law, and also one of the co-authors of the new paper. Contributing to the study was also Michigan State University College of Law professor, Barbara O'Brien.
"On the other hand, the low exoneration rate among multiple murder cases may simply mean that defendants who are convicted of killing more than two victims are less likely than others to linger on death row or have their death sentences reduced to life imprisonment," he adds.
In their research, the two identified that some ethnic groups were far more likely to be wrongfully convicted than others. Such is the case with black men accused of raping white women. The paper shows that the rate of false convictions in these circumstances is far greater than the mean.
Among the most studied crimes were those of murder and rape, but Gros says that they know virtually nothing about other sorts of illegal acts, ranging from property crimes to misdemeanors. The team focused its efforts on three types of sentences alone – rape, murder, and death. And while falsely convicted rapists were later exonerated via the use of DNA testing, which proved their innocence, the other two categories are far more difficult to analyze.
Death sentence convicts benefit from the largest amount of post-conviction investigations, as legal experts attempt to ensure that they don't put the wrong person to his/her death. Gros and O'Brien showed that attempting to build a case against to-be false convicts took as much as 250 percent more time than it did for those who were guilty of a crime.