More than 2,000 people in the United States have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated of serious crimes since 1989, according to a study on Monday.
The National Registry of Exonerations, created by the University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University, commissioned the study.
“There are far more false convictions than exonerations. That should come as no surprise. The essential fact about false convictions is that they are generally invisible: If we could spot them, they'd never happen in the first place,” the study states.
It added that despite “how tragic they are,” the 2,000 exonerations over the past 23 years “is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons.”
Nine out of ten of those exonerated are men, and around half are African-American.
The researchers said they hope the report will point out some of the failings in the U.S. justice system that allow for the conviction of innocent people.
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