confessed. Including such cases, the convictions in 39% of

homicide exonerations were caused in part by false confessions.

Juvenile and mentally disabled exonerees were, respectively, five         

times and nine times more likely to falsely confess than adult

exonerees without known mental disabilities.  

Sexual assault exonerations are overwhelmingly cases with mistaken eyewitness identifications (80%).  

53% of all sexual assault exonerations with mistaken eyewitness identifications involved black men who were accused of raping white women. This huge racial disproportion (about 10 to 1) is probably caused primarily by the difficulty of cross-racial eyewitness identification.  

Many sexual assault cases also include bad forensic evidence (37%).

Child sex abuse exonerations, by contrast, primarily involve fabricated crimes that never occurred at all (74%).

Robbery exonerations (like adult rape exonerations) are overwhelmingly cases with mistaken eyewitness identifications (81%).

The small number of drug crime exonerations we have found (25) include a high rate of deliberate misidentifications (48%).

Most individual no-crime exonerations are sexual assault cases in which the complaining witnesses fabricated crimes

Most fabricated crime exonerations are child sex abuse cases (70).

Two-thirds of the child sex abuse exonerations are child sex abuse

hysteria convictions from the 1980s and early 1990s.  

Group Exonerations  

By far the largest concentrations of no-crime cases are group exonerations: At least 1,170 defendants were exonerated in the aftermath of the discovery of 13 major scandals around the country in which police officers fabricated crimes, usually by planting drugs or guns on innocent defendants. We are confident that there are others that we have not yet identified.  

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