This year, protests calling for police reform and racial justice swept the nation. The people freed by the Innocence Project and its allies aren’t the victims of bad luck.
How police treat Black and brown people doesn’t just translate into police violence, but into wrongful convictions, too.
Wrongful convictions occur because inequality and racial bias continue to undergird our law enforcement and justice systems. They happen because our system too often incentivizes arrests, prosecutions, and convictions over the truth.
According to a recent report by the National Registry of Exonerations, police misconduct was at the core of 35% of exoneration cases since 1989, yet most officers face few consequences for their harmful actions. When this kind of abuse and misconduct goes unchecked, it can lead to wrongful convictions.
Here at the Innocence Project, we’re going into the new year with a plan to advocate for legislation that addresses police accountability and transparency — but how big we can go depends on what we raise in this moment.
In doing this work, I think of the many wrongly convicted people who were victims of police misconduct — like Alfred Chestnut, Ransom Watkins, and Andrew Stewart. The three teenagers were framed for murder by Baltimore detectives who coerced witnesses and hid evidence. During the course of his interrogation, one officer told Ransom, “You have two things against you — you’re Black and I have a badge.” All three were convicted and spent 36 years behind bars before being exonerated last year with the help of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the Baltimore Innocence Project Clinic. A public records request uncovered police reports with witness statements implicating a different person as the shooter.
Our justice system, as it currently stands, has built more protections for guilty police officers than it has innocent citizens. That is why the Innocence Project will be pushing for greater transparency around police misconduct.
The protests this year have made it clear that we need foundational and structural changes to our law enforcement and criminal legal systems. In 2021, the Innocence Project will be at the forefront of the movement to ensure those changes actually happen — but we can’t do it without your support.
The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
