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Joseph Sledge, who spent 37 years in prison, was one of five people exonerated in N.C. in 2015
The harder we look, the more evident it becomes: Our criminal justice system cannot be trusted to get it right.
This week a new report showed that a record 149 people were exonerated in 2015. That’s double the number exonerated in 2011, and the tally is rising steadily with each passing year. Five of the exonerees had been sentenced to death.
In North Carolina, five people were exonerated last year. They served a total of 89 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Four of the five had falsely confessed under pressure from investigators.
Let’s resist any urge to see the rising number of exonerations as proof that the system is working.
Exonerations still take far too long. Nationally, those freed in 2015 spent an average of 14 years behind bars before their innocence was recognized.
In North Carolina, one exoneree, Joseph Sledge, was imprisoned for 37 years. Henry McCollum, who was declared innocent and freed in 2014 after more than 30 years under a death sentence, was North Carolina’s longest serving death row inmate.
Much of the time, exonerations happen only over the objections of prosecutors and police, who fight to keep people behind bars even after evidence of their innocence becomes overwhelming. Official misconduct played a role in almost half the 2015 exonerations.
There were glimmers of hope in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Harris County, Texas, where individual prosecutors took on large-scale efforts to reexamine questionable convictions, resulting in more than 70 exonerations. But no similar efforts have been undertaken by North Carolina district attorneys.
The National Registry of Exonerations says the progress made toward finding innocent people in prison is only “a drop in the bucket.” The registry estimates that there are tens of thousands of false convictions each year in the U.S.
We must try harder to find and free the innocent people in our prisons. We must also stop believing we can create a system perfect enough to justify executing people. Actually, the nine people already freed from North Carolina’s death row should have persuaded us of that already.
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