Race and Wrongful Conviction

“Race is central to every aspect of criminal justice in the United States. The conviction of innocent defendants is no exception”(1)

In 2017, the National Registry of Exonerations put together a report on Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States. If someone has been exonerated, that means that they have been officially declared innocent of a crime they were convicted for based on new evidence of innocence. This study focused on the connection between wrongful conviction and race specifically in the United States. One thing to take note of is that this is not a study from the 1930s but from five years ago.

I include here some key conclusions they make in this study especially in connection to the relationships between race and accusations of rape of white women. In all crimes “a substantial majority of innocent people who are convicted of crimes in the United States are African Americans” (1). The study begins to unpack specific instances wherein the wrongful conviction of black people are most prevalent. They focus on murder, sexual assault, and drug related charges. All of these kinds of wrongful convictions affect black people in a heightened and cruel way. As our text portrays a case about alleged sexual assault, I included specific information about this topic. Based on known convictions we learn that “a prisoner serving time for sexual assault is three-and-a-half times as likely to be innocent if he is black than if he is white.”(12)

 

“Most innocent African American defendants who were exonerated for sexual assault had been convicted of raping white women. The leading cause of these false convictions was mistaken eyewitness identifications—a notoriously error-prone process when white Americans are asked to identify black strangers. As with murder exonerations, however, the leading cause is far from the only one. We see clear evidence of racial bias, ranging from unconscious bias to explicit racism. And, as with murder if not more so, black sexual assault exonerees spent more time in prison than their white counterparts”

As we see here, not only are black exonerees more likely to by wrongfully convicted, they will serve more time in prison. The study connects this reality to “The simplest explanation… [African Americans] received longer sentences when convicted, and they faced greater resistance to exoneration, even in cases in which they were ultimately released”(15).

“Of all the problems that plague American criminal justice, few if any are as incendiary as the relationship between rape and race. From the Reconstruction through the first half of the twentieth century, claims that black men raped white women triggered countless lynchings, riots and even massacres of African Americans. Those horrors have stopped, but the fears and biases that fed them have not disappeared. It should be no surprise that racial bias and outright racism also play a role in wrongful convictions for sexual assault.”(14)

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What we learn from this study is that the racism and dishonor of the circumstances in which Tom Robinson was wrongfully convicted continue to be found in the contemporary court system.

“In some cases, there is no need to speculate: the racism of those who investigated, prosecuted and punished the innocent black defendants is explicit and unmistakable.” (28)

Some people do not learn about this reality in an article online. This is the lived experience of countless people who have had to suffer greatly under the court system. If we get caught up in analysis and numbers, we will lose track of the humanity of these people.

Now that we know the data, where do we go from there?

How does this inform our understanding of the text in our current context?

In what ways have we grown even in the last few years since 2020?