WHAT WILL YOU FIND IN THE GROUPS REGISTRY?
“Groups” range in size from those with just a handful of defendants to others with tens of thousands of defendants. As with persons who are in the main Registry, the defendants listed here also had their convictions vacated and charges dismissed, based at least in part on new evidence of innocence.
Unlike individual exonerations in our main Registry, cases in the Groups Registry might not involve re-examinations of the individual cases. As a result, we often lack sufficient information about the defendants and their cases to document what happened the way we do in the main Registry.
Some defendants in the Groups Registry do have the benefit of individual re-examinations of their cases and meet the other criteria for an individual exoneration. In those instances, we also list them in the individual Registry.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF "GROUPS?"
Cases in the Groups Registry are often characterized by specific types of official misconduct, including:
Police Misconduct: police officers falsify reports, plant evidence, and commit perjury
Prosecutorial Misconduct: prosecutors knowingly allow police officers to testify without disclosing their history of misconduct in similar cases
Forensic Misconduct: laboratory analysts tamper with evidence and falsify reports
You can sort and filter the Groups Registry by several different factors: location, crimes, number of defendants, dates, and types of official misconduct. By clicking on a group, you can access a detailed summary, example cases for defendants that are included in the group, and documents associated with the cases included in the group.
ARTICLES
Mass Exonerations and Group Exonerations – 9 April 2018
In preparation for the Mass Exoneration Conference at Villanova in 2018, Professor Samuel Gross produced an overview of mass and group exonerations from 1989 to 2018.
Race and Group Exonerations - 7 March 2017
In this excerpt from our report on Race and Wrongful Convictions, we give an overview of the group exonerations we know of as of 2016, and explore the role of race in these exonerations.
Group Exonerations - June 2012
Most exonerations occur in cases where long prison terms (or death sentences) justify the vast amounts of time and money it takes to free an innocent person who has been convicted of a crime. In “group exonerations,” however, defendants are exonerated without detailed reinvestigation of their individual cases. A “group exoneration” arises from discovery of a concerted pattern of misconduct by one or several police officers who systematically frame innocent defendants. In our 2012 report, we included a section on group exonerations and how they differ from the other exonerations we report.
Back to The Groups Registry.