Our Voices

A wrongful conviction is when a person is convicted of a crime they did not commit. Wrongful convictions are often the result of multiple failures— usually by investigators, witnesses, scientists, and lawyers— that can occur at various stages of the criminal justice process. Convictions are typically considered wrongful for one of two reasons: the person is factually innocent of the charges brought against them (which is why wrongful convictions are often known as cases of “actual innocence”), or the individual’s case involved procedural errors that violated their rights.

Wrongful convictions are often attributed to five common causes:

Picture this: You’re a college student at a local community college working part time as a secretary in your school’s financial aid office. On your way home from class you smoke a cigarette, then toss it out of your car window into the empty left lane. A police officer happens to be rolling up behind you and catches you flicking the cigarette out of the window. The officer then pulls you over and gives you a littering ticket—a charge that could range from $100 to $1,000 in West Virginia. 

For another person who doesn’t have school costs, living expenses and a low wage, this penalty may be affordable, but for you, coming up with the couple hundred dollars is going to be near impossible. 

It’s 1961 in Panama City, Florida. Clarence Earl Gideon is charged with breaking and entering, but he can’t afford a lawyer. After requesting a court-appointed attorney, Gideon is denied on the grounds that there’s no threat of a death sentence. Gideon, without the representation of an attorney, was eventually convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

In 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction unanimously finding that Gideon’s right to counsel wasn’t granted. Gideon v. Wainwright of 1963 didn’t just determine that defendants have a right to court-appointed attorneys, but the decision mandated states provide a defense attorney for any indigent clients facing felony charges.

A common misconception in America is that the vast majority of people in prison have been proven guilty by the State. Another misconception is that no one would plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit. But the reality is that approximately 95% of felony convictions are obtained through guilty pleas. To put this statistic into perspective, this means that only one of every twenty convictions is obtained by the State going to trial and proving that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Of the 347 people who have had their convictions overturned by DNA evidence that was not available at the time of their trial, 10%, or 34 were originally convicted based on a guilty plea. This poses a very important question about our criminal justice system: why would someone who was actually innocent plead guilty?

This is only one of the shocking statistics that The Innocence Project seeks to address in their upcoming “Guilty Plea Problem” campaign. The goal of this campaign is to shed light on the overwhelming number of innocent people who are pleading guilty to crimes that they did not commit. Those 347 people are not representative of the total number of innocent individuals who remain behind bars after entering a guilty plea.