On December 19, 2002, Yusef Salaam was formally exonerated for a crime he did not commit. Thirteen and a half years earlier, on April 19, 1989, fifteen-year-old Yusef and four other youths—Raymond Santana (fourteen), Antron McCray (fifteen), Kevin Richardson (fourteen) and Korey Wise (sixteen)—were arrested for the assault and rape of a twenty-eight-year-old white woman in Central Park in New York City.
At the time of the arrests, a New York Daily News headline read: “Wolf Pack’s Prey: Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang.” Donald Trump paid $85,000 for full-page ads in four local papers demanding: “Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police! … I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
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Yusef Salaam, member of the Central Park Five, was elected to the New York City Council in 2023.
After what law enforcement authorities claimed to be an exhaustive police interrogation, Wise, McCray, Richardson, and Santana signed and videotaped confessions to the attack; Salaam wrote a confession but refused to sign it. None of their DNA samples, however, matched evidence taken from the rape kit exam. The Black and Latino teenagers—dubbed the Central Park Five—were convicted and each served between six and thirteen years in prison.
In 2002, the actual perpetrator confessed to the attack. A judge then overturned the convictions of the Central Park Five and, in 2014, the Five settled a civil rights lawsuit against New York City for $40 million.
In July 2023, Salaam was elected to the New York City Council.
The Central Park Five’s experience of wrongful conviction and incarceration is just one example of an increasing number of false convictions and eventual exonerations that have occurred throughout the country in recent years.
“Exonerations are important because they are the only way we know that the criminal justice system has failed catastrophically,” Barbara O’Brien, law professor at Michigan State University and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), tells The Progressive. “[Exonerations are] the only window we have into the phenomenon of innocent people being convicted of a crime they didn’t do.”
The NRE recorded 233 persons who were exonerated in 2022 for wrongful imprisonment, nearly 60 percent of which involved cases in which no crime ever occurred.
Like mass incarceration, wrongful convictions disproportionately impact Black communities. According to the NRE, innocent Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes.
Snapshot portraits of a handful of cases demonstrate just how deeply flawed and pernicious the U.S. judiciary system is.
On May 8, 2023, Louisiana resident Patrick Brown was exonerated from a life without parole sentence after serving twenty-nine years in prison for the 1994 rape of his six-year-old stepdaughter. For two decades, Brown’s stepdaughter repeatedly told prosecutors in New Orleans that Brown did not rape her—another family member did.
“I’ve written over 100 letters . . . mailed them to the [Defense Attorney’s] office,” she claimed in the courtroom. “Having your voice being silenced is the worst feeling in the world.”
Brown’s case was finally reviewed by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Civil Rights Division.
“Exonerations are important because they are the only way we know that the criminal justice system has failed catastrophically.” — Barbara O’Brien
Pamela Moses, a political activist in Memphis, Tennessee, was convicted in 2021 of voter fraud and was later sentenced to six years in prison—a conviction and sentence that were later overturned after a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Correction improperly withheld evidence.
Michael Morton spent twenty-five years in prison for a crime he did not commit. In 1986, Morton was convicted for the murder of his wife. More than two decades later, he was exonerated after DNA evidence implicated another man, who had also been tied to a similar Texas murder.
Perhaps most troubling about Morton’s case is the misconduct that occurred from the other side of the bench. Former prosecutor and judge Ken Anderson was sentenced to ten days in jail (only five of which he actually served) in 2013 for concealing and tampering with evidence that could have prevented Morton’s wrongful conviction in the first place.
Rapper Leon Benson—aka EL BENTLY 448—was exonerated last year after twenty-five years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Randal Reid, a Black man, was arrested, while driving in DeKalb County, Georgia, for crimes he allegedly committed in Louisiana. “I’m locked up for something I have no clue about,” he told The New York Times.
The stories of wrongful convictions are endless. Thanks to initiatives like the NRE and the Innocence Project, these stories are being told as a harsh reminder of the humans behind this relentless, unwarranted punishment—and the resulting physical, mental, emotional, and economic consequences.
The NRE identifies a half-dozen different causes for convictions that lead to exonerations, including official misconduct, false confessions, false accusation and witness statements, false or misleading forensic evidence, and ineffective legal counsel. All of these are systemic and often intentional.
Perhaps most alarming is what the NRE identifies as “no-crime” exonerations, which account for more than 40 percent of total exonerations to date. These include convictions for child abuse where an alleged victim later recants and says the abuse didn’t happen; murder convictions where the deaths were accidents (e.g., when fires resulting in deaths were mischaracterized as arson based on misleading forensic evidence); drug possession where corrupt police officers planted the evidence; murder convictions that turned out to be cases of self-defense; drug possession where the illicit substance turned out not to be drugs; and cases where a victim later says no crime took place.
Making matters worse, many defendants enter into plea agreements to avoid the possibility of a longer sentence if convicted in a trial. A disproportionate number of no-crime exonerations are female defendants, likely because “investigations by the police and decisions to prosecute are based on stereotypes of women as mothers and caregivers,” according to the NRE.
O’Brien says that the rising number of exonerations over the last few years is due to three key factors: an increase in organizations like the Innocence Project, more “conviction integrity units” in cities and states, and better DNA-matching technology.
“There are only a few prosecutors who have been personally punished for misconduct that resulted in serious consequences. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.” — Barbara O’Brien
Another factor is the role of law enforcement officers and local prosecutors in driving questionable arrests. In 2018, the police in Brookside, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham, increased wrongful arrests to raise local revenue. In 2020, a circuit-court judge in nearby Jefferson County threw out 110 convictions and dismissed the charges against twenty-two defendants based on police misconduct.
In Chicago, former Police Sergeant Ronald Watts and his team were responsible for hundreds of false drug convictions—more than 200 of which were overturned in the largest mass exoneration in Chicago history.
And then there is Louis Scarcella, a former New York City Police detective, known as “the closer,” who has been accused of framing dozens of people for murder. Many of his cases were based on concocting false witness testimony and coercing confessions. More than a dozen of his cases were overturned. Follow-up false-arrest suits have cost the city of New York $110 million in settlements so far. Scarcella has yet to be charged with a crime.
“There are only a few prosecutors who have been personally punished for misconduct that resulted in serious consequences,” O’Brien says. “They are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are extremely rare.”