Report: 4.1 Percent of Death Row Inmates Are Innocent
The study, conducted by legal experts from Michigan and Pennsylvania, is the first major analysis of its kind. Researchers used U.S. death row records between the years of 1973 and 2004; of the near 7500 defendants that were sentenced to death, 1.6 percent had been exonerated, 12 percent had been executive and 46 percent were still on death row.
“Most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and re-sentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply,” the authors found. Therefore, they say the 4.1 percent estimate “is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States."
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