Up to 120,000 innocent people are in US prisons
Guilty pleas and false confessions by the innocent are counterintuitive phenomena, says Rebecca Brown, director of state policy at the non-profit Innocence Project. But of the 321 DNA exonerations that have occurred in the United States, 30 have involved people who originally pled guilty to crimes they didn't commit. It's hard to accept that people who are innocent would knowingly incriminate themselves, but it happens frequently.
"Our cases are almost exclusively rapes and murders — very, very serious crimes — and even then, innocent people are pleading guilty," Brown says. "Now spread that out across the entire system to include lower-level offenses, the vast majority of which are pled out, and the implications are clear."
According to the Innocence Project's estimates, between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of all US prisoners are innocent. The American prison population numbers about 2.4 million. Using those numbers, as many as 120,000 innocent people could currently be in prison.
During the first half of the 20th century and into the second, the incarceration rate in America hovered around 100 people per every 100,000. Then politicians decided to get "tough on crime."
By 1996 there were 427 imprisoned for every 100,000. Today, there are about 707.
Thanks to the "criminalization of everything," almost three times as many felony cases enter the court system today as they did 25 years ago. If every one of those cases went to trial, the justice system would quickly collapse under the load. Thus, more than 96 percent of all cases end in a plea bargain.
"The system isn't geared to discover innocence or guilt — it's geared to get people through the system as quickly and efficiently as possible," says John Pollok, a defense lawyer who has defended clients ranging from the mayor of Waterbury, Connecticut to members of the Gambino crime family. "What it comes down to for a defense lawyer is really to try and minimize harm."
Overwhelmingly, minimizing harm means taking a deal instead of taking your chances at trial. And just as false confessions lead to false convictions, coercive plea bargains are also responsible for sending thousands of innocent people to prison.
"Everybody swallows the lie because they want to believe that the system works," Pollok says. "The short of it is, each component of the system, from lawyers to judges to the way we charge people, is broken."
Judge Jed Rakoff wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, "The Supreme Court's suggestion that a plea bargain is a fair and voluntary contractual arrangement between two relatively equal parties is a total myth: It is much more like a 'contract of adhesion' in which one party can effectively force its will on the other party."
Rakoff tells me there are too many variables involved to pin down precisely how many innocent people are in prison, but he says criminologists peg the rate at which innocent people confess to crimes during plea bargains between 2 percent and 8 percent. A spread that wide rightfully raises suspicions, and so Rakoff chooses to instead use an extremely conservative estimate of 1 percent.
Even then, that puts up to 20,000 people behind bars for crimes they did not commit due to pressure to accept pleas.
"We know for a fact that there are innocent people taking pleas and going to prison," Rakoff says. "That's not conjecture."
The federal conviction rate is an astonishing 97 percent, and studies have shown that defendants who refuse plea bargains are put behind bars for roughly nine times as long as those who take deals. (Twelve of the inmates exonerated by the Innocence Project were threatened with the death penalty before deciding to plead guilty.) As one former US Attorney told Human Rights Watch (HRW) last year, "If you reject the plea, we'll throw everything at you. We won't think about what is a 'just' sentence."
The fact that innocent people get caught up in the system is unconscionable, says JoAnne Page, president and CEO of the Fortune Society, a New York City-based nonprofit that helps the formerly incarcerated rebuild their lives after release. "But," she tells me, "the norm is pretty horrible, too."
"We are crippling entire generations of people," Page says. "Our punishments are out of line with the crimes and with any other society's version of what is reasonable. And then when people get out, we don't stop the punishment."
There is agreement on both the political left and right that the modern American criminal justice system has become far more punitive than anyone ever expected. But that doesn't mean anything will change. Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder urged Congress to pass the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that would reform federal mandatory minimums.
The National Association of Assistant US Attorneys open opposition is truly disturbing. Twenty-nine former top Justice Department officials to Senate leaders sent a letter condemning the Act and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa took the Senate floor to express his opposition.
When the salaries of judges, DA's, probation officers, cops and bail bondsman, essentially the entire corrupt justice system is threatened they come out in opposition and want to keep the status-quo.
https://news.vice.com/article/why-are-there-up-to-120000-innocent-people-in-us-prisons