Each February, Black History Month serves as a time to honor the achievements and sacrifices of African Americans who have helped shape the nation. This tradition was started in the Jim Crow era and was officially recognized in 1976 as one of the nation’s annual celebrations.
As we celebrate the progress that has been made, we must also reflect on how far we need to go to make our nation’s systems truly just and fair for Black Americans. Racial discrimination and bias have been deeply embedded in our criminal legal system from its inception and it continues to persist today. These issues have resulted in a disproportionate number of BIPOC and especially innocent Black people being wrongfully convicted.
Here are five ways wrongful convictions disproportionately affect Black Americans:
1. While Black people make up just 13.6% of the U.S. population, they account for more than 50% of exonerated people.
2. Innocent Black people are about seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes.
3. It takes Black people an average of three years longer than white people to be exonerated in murder cases.
4. More than half of death row exonerees are Black.
5. Innocent Black people spend an average of 13.8 years wrongly imprisoned — about 45% longer than innocent white people.
Racial disparities have been recognized in three types of crimes that result in the largest numbers of exonerations: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes.
Drivers that contribute to these statistics include cognitive biases, deception in interrogations, threats to witnesses and the accused, tainted witness identification, cross-racial witness misidentification, and outright racism.
It is crucial that we work to implement reforms that address issues of racial profiling, cognitive bias and official misconduct within the systems that impact Black communities.
At MTIP, we work to not only free those wrongfully convicted, but also to address the disproportionate and unjust treatment that leads to the wrongful conviction of Black Americans, by advocating for systems of Justice that are accurate, accountable, and fair for all.