A recent San Francisco magazine article entitled “Innocence Lost,” examines California’s record of wrongful convictions. The researchers report that the nation’s largest criminal justice system has sent more innocent people to prison for longer terms than any other state. Among the exonerees are three from the state’s death row and nearly 200 people who were serving either life or very long terms. The magazine notes that despite these numbers, state lawmakers have repeatedly passed up opportunities to put safeguards in place that could prevent such errors from happening in the future. Among other key finding’s in the magazine’s year-long review of wrongful convictions were the following:
- Over the past 15 years, at least 200 California inmates have been freed after courts found they were unjustly convicted - nearly twice the number of exonerations as in the next two states (Illinois and Texas) combined.
- California has been sentencing people to life at an alarming rate. More than 30,000 inmates are serving life terms, twice as many as in the entire European Union, which has a population 12 times larger. Approximately 17% of California inmates are lifers, compared to 9% of prisoners in the U.S. as a whole.
- Some 63% of wrongful convictions in San Francisco’s research sample of 30 cases involved serious police error or misconduct. Some 47% of wrongful convictions in the sample involved serious prosecutorial error or misconduct. More than 90% were upheld on direct appeal.
- In a survey of 676 voters conducted for the magazine by David Binder Research, 69% believe lifers should have the same rights to free attorneys and levels of appeal as people facing execution. Of those polled, 61% also support adding safeguards to prevent wrongful life sentences and 78% favor firing police or prosecutors who break the rules to get a conviction. Currently, action is rarely ever taken against these individuals.
- While DNA databases may be helpful in freeing some wrongly convicted individuals, only about 10% of criminal cases have any biological evidence - blood, semen, etc. - to test.
- California’s “three strikes” law has added approximately 7,500 people serving life terms to the state’s prisons. It has pressured some innocent people to accept deals and plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit rather than risk the automatic life sentence of a third strike.