Filing Grievances, Request for Courts of Inquiry in Wrongful Conviction and Exoneration Cases
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
On December 12, 2011, writing for Mother Jones, Beth Schwartzapfel and Hannah Levintova published a piece titled “How Many Innocent People Are In Prison?”—a piece based in part on research conducted by University of Michigan Law Professor Samuel Gross. Gross’s research, with the assistance of the New York-based Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions, determined there have been as many as 850 exonerations in this country since the late 1980s. The Innocence Project lists 282 exonerations since 1989 based on DNA evidence alone. Extrapolating from these two figures, Schwartzapfel and Levintova conservatively estimate that 1 percent of the total prison population in the United States have been wrongfully convicted. Put it raw numbers, this means that approximately 20,000 inmates in the nation’s prison system were wrongfully convicted.
“We don’t even have a denominator,” University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett told the Mother Jones writers. “But the wrongful convictions we do know about suggest that there’s a big problem.”
Writing in a 2008 paper titled “Frequency and Predictors of False Conviction,” Gross reached the same conclusion as Garrett: “One difficulty in making generalizations about false convictions is that the ones we know about, exonerations, are clearly a small and unrepresentative sample of all false convictions.” Gross added that death penalty cases are the only ones in which false convictions can be accurately measured because they have trial transcripts. Gross’ 2008 paper reported that in the modern era the rate of exoneration is 2.3 percent in capital cases—and using this percentage, the Mother Jones writers reasonably extrapolated that there could have been as many as 87,000 wrongfully convicted people in the nation’s general prison population between 1989 and 2003.
Utilizing data compiled by Mother Jones, the Texas Tribune found, not surprisingly, that Texas leads the nation with 48 DNA exonerations and is third behind Illinois (95) and New York (83) with 78 total exonerations since 1989. In an article titled “No Country For Innocent Men,” which will appear in the Jan./Feb.2012 edition of Mother Jones, Beth Schwartzapfel found that 56 of these exonerations, including five death penalty cases, occurred under the reign of current Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry, who still maintains that the criminal justice system is working. These figures are scary in light of the fact that 238 executions have taken place under Perry’s governorship—including Cameron Todd Willingham who, according to reputable fire forensic experts, was probably innocent of the arson murders of his three children in December 1991.
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