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More than half of all wrongful criminal convictions are caused by government misconduct. Misconduct can be intentional or unintentional, but either way innocent people are found guilty

When a prisoner is granted their freedom because they were wrongly convicted of a crime, the focus turns to the years, or decades, they spent behind bars. A new study digs into the reasons people are wrongly convicted, and it has found that 54 percent of those defendants are victimized by official misconduct, with police involved in 34 percent of cases, prosecutors in 30 percent, and some cases involving both police and prosecutors.

Misconduct by police, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials is a regular problem,” said Samuel R. Gross, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a co-founder of the registry, “and it produces a steady stream of convictions of innocent people.” And because the data for exonerations is gathered randomly, from news reports and legal rulings, with no central repository of court statistics, “it is clear to us that misconduct occurs in many more cases” than the registry tracks.

The study cites five types of misconduct that lead to wrongful convictions: witness tampering, misconduct in interrogations, fabricating evidence, concealing exculpatory evidence and misconduct at trial. It found that Black defendants were slightly more likely than White defendants to be victims of misconduct, 57 percent to 52 percent, but that the racial difference was much larger for drug crimes, 47 to 22 percent, and in murder cases, 78 to 64 percent. In some instances, authorities purposefully sought to improperly influence a case, other times their missteps were unintentional or based on flawed techniques, Gross said.

Study can be found HERE.