Last year saw a new Record in the American Justice system. Nearly 150 people were Exonerated for wrongful convictions, with the average prison stay for these victims of the system being 14 years.  Consider that: the number of years wasted in prison from the lives of innocent people in 2015 alone is well over 2000 years. That is just one year and only those who were exonerated- and let’s face it, if 150 were exonerated, we can be assured that there were many innocent people who were not.

It doesn’t end there. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “A record 58 people were exonerated in homicide cases last year, including five people who had been sentenced to death, one each in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas. They had served 30, 25, 28, 19, and 10 years, respectively. The longest-serving was EJI client Anthony Ray Hinton, who was exonerated and released last April after three decades on Alabama’s death row. More than two-thirds of the people exonerated in homicide cases in 2015 were minorities; half were African American.”

How did so many innocent people get convicted? A shocking 27 exonerations last year were based on False Confessions, with a record 65 were in guilty-plea cases. “More than 80 percent of the false confessions were in homicide cases, mostly by defendants who were under 18 or mentally handicapped or both, the registry reports.” According to one report, “By any reasonable accounting, there are tens of thousands of false convictions each year across the country, and many more that have accumulated over the decades.”

So, given the system is as it is- explicitly and scandalously broken- how can we continue to support sentencing (such as the Death penalty)? This is yet another reason I wrote “The Last Verdict”. Let’s work together to see these injustices ended.

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