VOICES FOR JUSTICE, vol. 5

Dear Readers,

We welcome you all to yet another eye-opening and thought provoking issue of our Voices for Justice newsletter. In this month’s issue, we continue the discussion of wrongful convictions, and how police corruption is considered a leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States.

On Thursday, September 8, 2022, new reports of police corruption surfaced after The Daily News reported that Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez wants to vacate nearly 400 criminal convictions tied to 13 dirty NYPD officers who served as key witnesses before they were, themselves, found guilty of crimes including murder, planting drugs, taking bribes and perjury. Among the 13 cops on the list included Michael Folder, who pled guilty in 2019 to falsifying evidence and lying under oath. “These former police officers were found to have committed serious misconduct that directly relates to their official job duties, calling into question the integrity of every arrest they have made,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. Elizabeth Felber of the Legal Aid Society lauded Gonzalez’s decision in saying, “while we applaud this, the people prosecuted in these cases were forced to endure hardships that should never have happened to begin with.”

According to studies released, by the National Registry of Exonerations, researchers studied 2,400 convictions of defendants who were later found innocent over a thirty year period and found that 35% of those cases involved some type of misconduct by police, while 54% involved misconduct by police or prosecutors, indicating that police and prosecutors’ misconduct is responsible for over 1,000 documented wrongful convictions unearthed in the United States since 1989. Those reports show that there have been approximately 3,247 exonerations since 1989 amounting to more than 27,200 years lost behind bars. In addition, police officers are rarely disciplined or convicted as a consequence for their misconduct.

In 2017, statistics released by the National Registry of Exonerations, documented 84 cases–half of them homicides–in which people were freed from prison after their convictions were revealed to be tainted by police misconduct, as opposed to mistaken identifications. Witness tampering, coerced confessions, violent interrogations, falsifying evidence, misleading lineups, photo arrays, and a failure to turn over exculpatory evidence as required by law, account for the majority of the misconduct that leads to wrongful convictions.

In recent years, Former Detective Louis Scarcella has been the headlining face and name for police corruption in New York City, as over a dozen of the 40 cases the Kings County District Attorney’s CRU (conviction review unit) were investigating, which involved the disgraced detective’s acts of malfeasance and fabricating false identification evidence had been overturned. Derrick Hamilton, Shabaka Shakur, John Bunn, Rosean Hargrove, David Ranta, Emmanuel Cooper, and Jabbar Washington all spent over a decade in prison wrongfully convicted due to Scarcella’s misconduct before they were exonerated.

In closing, 72% of all instances of police misconduct that led to wrongful convictions in the United States incarcerated people of color. People of color represent over 64% of those wrongfully convicted nationally, and disproportionately experienced police misconduct. There is no one explanation for the heavy concentration of Black defendants among those convicted of crimes they did not commit. African-Americans are subject to more attention and surveillance from police than whites. One reason that is often offered is that they are more likely to live in high-crime areas, but that is not a valid explanation.