I’ve been thinking this week about exoneration. Here is the definition of exoneration from the University of Michigan Law School:
In general, an exoneration occurs when a person who has been convicted of a crime is officially cleared after new evidence of innocence becomes available.
On the same page as the general definition above, they have a more legally-precise definition.
Just to emphasize a couple points: Being exonerated is not the same as being found innocent at trial. In fact, in order to fit the definition, the individual must have initially been convicted at trial. Also, although exonerations sometimes involve pardons, that is not a necessary condition.
To put it another way, these are individuals who were wrongfully convicted.
This has been on my mind since visiting The National Registry of Exonerations on the Internet. The Registry is a joint project between the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and the Michigan State University College of Law. The goal of the project is to develop a complete database–a registry–of all exonerations going back through 1989.
The Registry currently has information on 3,630 exonerations. You can see a tabular display of the data at this page. Some of these individuals received sentences of life without parole; some received death sentences.
The mission of the Registry is to collect information about how these wrongful convictions occurred in order not to make the same mistakes in the future.
Published: Sat 27 Dec 2024
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