A wrongful conviction comes in different shapes and sizes and it can be caused by more than one factor within the justice system. There is a rising number of exonerations and awareness to Innocence Projects that assist in proving that the wrongfully convicted prisoner is innocent. According to Michigan Law at the University of Michigan, there are many factors that play into a wrongful conviction. These are the most common causes of a wrongful conviction: eyewitness misidentification, junk science, false confessions, government misconduct, bad lawyering and snitches ("Causes of Wrongful Convictions", n.d). Data from the National Registry of Exonerations form the Death Penalty Information Center website shows that the two most predominant influences of death penalty wrongful convictions are official misconduct and perjury of false accusation with a link to the race of the offender. The exoneration database demonstrates thirty-four cases over the past decade that involved more than one influence resulting in a wrongful conviction. "Every one of these cases involved some combination of official misconduct, perjury or false accusation, or false or misleading forensic evidence; and more than three-quarters (26 cases, 76.5%) involved at least two of these factors. Fewer than one-tenth of the cases (3, 8.8%) involved a single wrongful cause. 91.2% (31 cases) had multiple contributing factors and nearly half (16 cases, 47.1%) had three or more contributing causes." ("Causes of Wrongful Convictions", n.d).
The Death Penalty Information Center website will show a table of the most recent exonerations and it is pretty interesting. It provides the person's name, race, state, year and contributing factors to their wrongful conviction. I noticed that over half of the cases involved a person who identified as black with contributing factors such as misleading or false accusations. I believe wrongful convictions stem from personal biases which is very unconstitutional. This topic is similar to police discretion and how it is hard to catch the act of being bias until it is too late. The exoneration process is usually taken by an Innocence Project case manager where they have unlimited cases to cover and it can take months to decades to complete one case. Some states even require them to find the guilty person of the crime first before relieving the wrongfully convicted prisoner (De la Fuente, A., 2016).