Ghost of the Innocent Man

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The National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the law schools at Northwestern and the University of Michigan, issued its first report of known wrongful convictions in the United States, case after case summarized in compact, half-page paragraphs, alongside a notice that these were only the beginning — 873 of them, between 11 and 66 in each year for
more than two decades. Certainly more existed, going back further. But DNA testing had come into use only in 1989, and the registry had to begin somewhere. Its authors had chosen there.

Most of the 873 had been convicted of rape or homicide, only because these were the crimes where postconviction resources were concentrated. If you were a lawyer who recognized that trial verdicts could be mistakes, and felt moved to act, naturally you prioritized those assigned the longest sentences, or the death penalty, since it was where you felt most needed. Obviously those verdicts followed the most heinous crimes. This explained why most exonerations one saw in the news were for murders or rapes — not because those were the only verdicts reached in error, but because they received the most postconviction scrutiny. It stood to reason that innocent people were also being convicted of theft, or assault, or drug sales, or tax fraud, at roughly the same rate. It was just that no one was investigating those. “The procedure for convicting a defendant of a crime is set by law,” the registry reported, to explain why it could be so difficult to identify mistakes. “There is no parallel procedure for deciding that a convicted defendant is innocent.” In fact, this last sentence was false — of course there was such a procedure, in North Carolina. Chris Mumma had seen to it personally.

The 873 exonerations had been discovered in forty-three different states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. The state with the most was Illinois, followed by New York, Texas, and California. It could be tempting to think, momentarily, that these were the states doing the worst job, wrongly convicting the most people. More likely the reverse was true; these were the states doing the best job, searching most responsibly for errors and overturning them. Two of the oldest, best-funded innocence projects in the country stood in Chicago and in New York City. Another was in Northern California. Well-run conviction integrity units were housed inside the DA’s offices of Dallas and Houston. Coincidence? Chris doubted it. The prospect that kept her awake at night was that courtrooms in the other forty-six
states across the country convicted just as many innocent people, proportionally to their populations, and simply hadn’t noticed yet. Not a single exoneration, as far as the registry could find, had ever occurred in Maine or Vermont, in Delaware or New Mexico, in Wyoming or either of the Dakotas. Did that mean no innocent person had ever been convicted in those places? No. Men and women just like Willie Grimes, with siblings just like Gladys, with friends like Thomas Hill and Louie Ross, were languishing in those states at this very moment, wandering hopelessly in loops around a
prison yard, or tossing on a thin, state-issue mattress, while Chris, sleepless
at three o’clock in the morning, stared at her ceiling in Durham.

She wasn’t surprised when, hardly ten months after its initial report, the registry published an update. Since listing those 873, researchers already had found 198 more. In 2012 alone, 97 people besides Willie had been exonerated — a new American record, though it would stand only briefly. Two years later would come 140 more exonerations. Which would stand even more briefly. The following year, 2015, would add another 151. The full tally by then would exceed 1,700, with at least one in each state in the country.

In its final pages, the registry’s 2015 report would also mention, at last, a peculiar state agency. “In nine years of operation, the NCIIC has been responsible for nine exonerations. There’s a lot to be said for agencies like the NCIIC — but there are no other agencies like the NCIIC in the United States. To create one would require legislative action and . . . funding by a legislature and a governor. Outside North Carolina, no state has been interested.”

In 2016, 166 more men and women would be exonerated. Another record. “Since 2011,” the registry would explain, “the annual number of exonerations has more than doubled.”

On March 1, 2017, the number of exonerations would surpass two
thousand.

Today the registry is adding exonerations weekly.


Excerpted from Ghost of the Innocent Man. Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Rachlin. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

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