![]() They also often do not attract much public notice, and researchers are still trying to document them. These cases typically involve victims who served relatively short terms in prison or were on probation. The drug cases described in the report, including those involving Watts and a crew of officers who worked with him, have mostly come to light as so-called “group exonerations” - people whose convictions have been dismissed en masse because they were linked to police graft. Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune via Getty Images file Ronald Watts was sentenced to 22 months in prison in 2013. ![]() The gap is much greater in murders (78 percent to 64 percent) and drug cases (47 percent to 22 percent), the report said. The new report found that Black exonerees were slightly more likely than white exonerees (57 percent to 51 percent) to be the victims of official misconduct. ![]() Black people are also imprisoned at five times the rate of white people, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. Prior research by the registry found that Black Americans, about 13 percent of the nation’s population, account for 48 percent of all known exonerations. The findings provide further evidence of the racial divide in the criminal justice system, Gross said. “This is all trying to see through a crack in a wall,” said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor. The report, therefore, provides just a glimpse of how misconduct tarnishes the criminal justice system, the report’s authors said. Untold numbers of Americans who’ve been wrongly convicted - including many who pleaded guilty to relatively low-level crimes - do not have the resources or lawyers needed to challenge their convictions, researchers say. The 188-page report was limited to cases in which people challenged their convictions and were cleared by a judge or a government agency. ![]() The tally is very likely a vast undercount of the actual number of instances in which misconduct has led to the convictions of innocent people, according to researchers at the registry, which is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and the Michigan State University College of Law. The study, published Tuesday, examined 2,400 cases from 1989 through February 2019 in which people were absolved of criminal convictions, and it found that 54 percent involved corruption or negligence by police, prosecutors, lab workers or other government employees. Those tainted cases, which damaged many lives and the public trust, are just a small fraction of more than 1,000 tallied in a new nationwide study by the registry that measures the role of government misconduct in wrongful convictions - and how that misconduct falls heaviest on Black exonerees. The investigation led to exonerations of more than 70 of Watts’ victims, including Almond - a list that continues to grow. The wrongful conviction, and the corruption that caused it, likely would have remained hidden if not for a federal investigation of Watts that resulted years later in the sergeant's pleading guilty in an unrelated case to stealing from an informant.
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