Since 2000, exonerations have averaged 52 a year -- one a week -- 40% of which include DNA evidence.
DNA exonerations are increasingly older cases: The average time from conviction to a DNA exoneration is now about 18 years, up from less than 7 years in the early 1990s, and murder cases -- since 2008 most DNA exonerations are murder prosecutions, usually rape-murders, rather than sexual assaults.
The exonerations in the Registry are unevenly distributed geographically. They concentrated in several states, led by Illinois, New York, Texas and California.
Some counties, like Cook (Chicago), Illinois, and Dallas, Texas, have dozens of exoneration; other counties with millions of people, like San Bernardino, California and Fairfax, Virginia, have none. Neighboring counties are often very far apart. Santa Clara County, California -- home of the Northern California Innocence Project -- has 10 exonerations; directly to its north, Alameda County
has more violent crime but no known exonerations.
The 873 exonerations are mostly rape and murder cases, but the data also include 18-20 many more exonerations for other crimes than previously known. All told, we have:
48% homicides (416) including 12% death sentences (101)
35% sexual assaults (305)
5% robberies (47)
5% other violent crimes (47)
7% drug, white collar and other non-violent crimes (58)
Causes of False Convictions
For all exonerations, the most common causal factors that contributed to the underlying false convictions are perjury or false accusation (51%), mistaken eyewitness identification (43%) and official misconduct (42%) -- followed by false or misleading forensic evidence (24%) and false confession (16%).
The frequencies of these causal factors vary greatly from one type of crime to another. See Table 13. -Homicide exonerations: The leading contributing cause is perjury or false accusation (66%) -- mostly deliberate misidentifications (44%).
Homicide case also have a high rate of official misconduct (56%). Homicide exonerations include 76% of all false confessions in the data.
Some exonerees were falsely implicated by a co-defendant who
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