Over 4% of Prisoners Sentenced to Death Are Innocent, Study Suggests

A new study suggests that at least 4.1% of
death row prisoners are innocent.
Image: Shutterstock

According to a new study from the National Academy of Sciences, 1 in 25 people sentenced to death in the United States are innocent—or about 4.1 percent of all criminal defendants given the death penalty.

“We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States,” reads the abstract for the study—meaning that it’s likely the percentage is actually higher.

And, as the study notes, there is no “systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction,” which is how we end up with false convictions in the first place. Throughout history, a few false convictions have been discovered; because most of those have been concentrated in death penalty cases, the researchers used this data to estimate the overall average rate of false convictions.

The study does bring to light one particularly intriguing point of interest—the fact that there are far more overturned convictions in prisoners on death row than those spending life (or some term) in prison. This is because the cases for death row inmates receive far more scrutiny than other cases in an effort to avoid executing prisoners that are, in fact innocent.

“Our data and the experience of practitioners in the field both indicate that the criminal justice system goes to far greater lengths to avoid executing innocent defendants than to prevent them from remaining in prison indefinitely,” reads the study.

This fact is incredibly saddening, as it means that there are likely thousands of innocent people locked up—on death row or not—that will probably never be exonerated for their “crimes” and had their lives ruined by a false conviction.