The Reality

While you're reading this article, somewhere in America, an innocent person will be convicted of a crime they had nothing to do with.

This isn't hyperbole or sensationalism—it's math and facts. Every year, our courts hand down roughly 195,000 new convictions. With a conservative wrongful conviction rate of 5%, that's 9,750 innocent people losing their freedom annually. Breaking it down further: 26 wrongful convictions every day, or one innocent life destroyed every single hour of every single day.

Even with our best efforts in our best year for exonerations—2022, with an amazing 238 innocent people freed—over 9,500 wrongfully convicted people remained behind bars, representing just a 2.5% chance of being exonerated. That's 9,500 lives shattered, with little to no hope for justice. 

On death row, the stakes are even more terrifying. For every eight people executed in the U.S. since 1989, it's estimated that one was innocent. The Supreme Court often speaks of "finality" as a goal in the criminal justice process, emphasizing the importance of concluding cases and providing closure for the victims. But, in reality, this one-in-eight error rate represents the most devastating kind of finality—the irreversible finality of wrongful executions and convictions.

At the current estimated wrongful conviction rate of 5%, it's as if we've filled a massive stadium with over 70,000 innocent people—then locked the gates, walked away, and erased them from our minds. Imagine an entire city's worth of innocent souls, their lives reduced to irrelevance in a nightmare created by the very system that was supposed to protect them.

If lucky enough to be exonerated, the average time it will take is seventeen years. And how many can expect to be rescued from this dystopia? Barely half a person. Let that sink in. While 26 innocent souls are locked away each day for crimes they didn't commit, only half a person will be exonerated. Half a person. Picture a courtroom where 26 innocent people stand convicted, and only one-half of one person will ever see justice. And even these precious few exonerations wouldn't exist without the tireless dedication of innocence organizations and advocates who tirelessly spend years—sometimes decades—fighting to uncover the truth and set the innocent free.