Study: One Out of Twenty Five Death Row Inmates Is Innocent

How many American prisoners
have been wrongfully convicted of the crimes they’re serving time
for? Answering that question would help measure the effectiveness
the criminal justice system.

Researchers of a
study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences tried to get to this answer by reviewing death
penalty cases. Because of the life-or-death stakes involved, a lot
more effort is exerted to exonerate death row inmates than any
other cohort of inmate.

In fact, according to the research, 1.7 percent of all death row
inmates are eventually exonerated. It’s a higher number than the
one quoted by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Kansas v.
Marsh, a case about the death penalty. He claimed the error
rate was .027 percent. The researchers dismissed that number; they
say it was arrived at by extending the exoneration rate of a small
subgroup of inmates (capital cases) to the wider American prison
population.

Instead, the researchers used the exoneration rate on death row
and extended it to inmates whose capital punishment is replaced by
life imprisonment, at which point efforts to exonerate them largely
subside. Based on that idea, they estimate 4.1 percent, or one in
25, of all death row inmates are innocent, meaning that they would
be exonerated if they remained on death row.

In that context, laws like Florida’s recently enacted “Timely
Justice Act,” which aims to shorten the average time between a
sentence of death and the execution, only serve to increase the
likelihood an innocent person is executed by cutting the amount of
time the inmate has to use the courts to argue for his freedom.
It’s a bugaboo of capital punishment aficionados, this time death
row inmates spend trying not to be killed instead of actually being
killed. The entire appeals process associated with death row
drives the
cost of the death penalty well above the cost of imprisoning
someone for life. This week’s new study shows the importance of
giving death row inmates adequate time to mount an appeal. It also
calls into question efforts inmates may make to get off death row
but remain in prison, as their chances of being successfully
exonerated drop precipitously once their life isn’t at stake.