Death Row Exoneration Research Paper

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crimes and later exonerated, the researchers write, they constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in ‘group exonerations.
For homicides, researchers found not just that black people were more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted, but that innocent black people spent more time in prison before they were exonerated:
• “Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of homicides than innocent white people.”
• “African Americans imprisoned for murder …show more content…

For death row exonerations in the Registry the average delays and the difference by race are larger, 16 years for black defendants and 12 years for whites.
Overall, the study paints a very clear picture: Black people are disadvantaged within the criminal justice system, leading to massive disparities even among those who are entirely innocent. The causes we have identified run from inevitable consequences of patterns in crime and punishment to deliberate acts of racism, with many stops in between. the researchers found that some of the disparity is driven in large part by higher homicide rates in black communities. CASE STUDY …show more content…

The two main categories in this typology are homicide related to intimate partner or family relationships, in which victim and perpetrator are relatives, share the same household and/or an intimate relationship; and other interpersonal homicide, in which the victim and perpetrator may or may not know each other. The relationship in intimate partner/ family-related homicide is distinguished from the relationship in the other interpersonal homicide category by the level of emotional attachment and other links, often of an economic or legal nature, between victim and perpetrator. Homicides within this typology can be the result of a premeditated design or of a random act of violence, but the nature of the relationship between perpetrator and victim is a fundamental feature of this crime. Straddling the divide between the private and public spheres, much of this type of violence is attributed to the very nature of coexisting with and among

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