1000 Wrongfully Convicted and Counting: New Registry Checks Justice System's Power

If you were wrongfully convicted of a crime, how would you fight the system? 16-year-old Arthur Carmona and his mom, Ronnie Sandoval, spent years doing just that.

"He wanted to fight. He said, 'I'm not signing shit. If I can't prove I'm innocent then I'm going to die in here,'" says Ronnie of her son. She fought tirelessly to get Arthur out of prison after he was wrongfully convicted of 12 counts of armed robbery.

"I'm disgusted with what they did to my son," Ronnie says, "it was as simple as him walking out the door to go play video games and he stepped into the Twilight Zone, and it followed him for all the days of his life."

How did Arthur get thrown in prison for a crime he didn't commit? Rob Warden, director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, says it's not uncommon.

"Every case that we look at is different," says Warden, "but there are common elements and there are things that seem to transcend them." Warden helped develop a project to raise awareness about wrongful convictions, and bring about change. The National Registry of Exonerations was released earlier this year and documents over a thousand cases of exonerations in the US.

"Our great hope for the registry is [that it will] provide data that will fortify arguments for reform," Warden says.

The registry also provides reasons why the exonerees were wrongfully convicted such as false confessions, errors with eyewitness testimony and a phenomenon called "tunnel vision."

"It's very difficult to exonerate someone," Warden says, "you find that once you are convicted of a crime, the evidence that it takes to exonerate you just has to be far greater than the evidence that it took to convict you in the first place."

Yet Warden hopes the registry will highlight these systemic problems with the justice system and help free the wrongfully convicted still behind bars.

About 8 minutes.

Written and produced by Tracy Oppenheimer. Camera by Paul Detrick and Zach Weissmueller.

Go to http://reason.com/reasontv for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

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[SJgunguy24]

The police and DA's need to be held personally responsible for their actions. If they can get medals and awards for acts of bravery and self less acts, they should pay for fuck ups of epic proportions. Then and only then will they temper those attitudes.

[Michael Price]

Hey genius if 10 innocent men ar imprisoned then 10 guilty men go free, how is that better than one guilty man going free?

[Bill Pigg]

I'm a troll. It's facetious. Get over it.

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[javier cruz]

pray to God that you nor' none of your decendants ever experience what this innocent Man and Woman do.

[fishblades]

I agree there should be consequences for things like this. The fundamental problem is nothing humans will ever do will be perfect. Our system with a Jury trial by your peers is as good as we are going to get.

I thought this was the fundamental difference between the right and the left. Progressives believe they can make a perfect society and fix human flaws with through Institutions and we believe we do our best to be as perfect as we can.

[yourBIGpain]

The courts are so treasonously corrupt it isn't even funny. The entire basis of law in this country is a "cause of action" did someones wrongful act cause a human any damage, loss or wrong. If NO then the court has NO authority to do a dang thing to you, if they do they are acting criminally in fraud against you because of your ignorance. You cannot be ignorant and free. Never trust a cop or a judge they do not care about justice only what they can steal from you.

[bsabruzzo]

Isn't the saying supposed to be "Its better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be inprisoned"?

Actually it was Blackstone's "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", which Ben Franklin expanded to "it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer"

Once you punish an innocent, you tend to stop seeking the guilty.

[VooDoo669]

Lets only hope you are one of those 1000. Moron.

[SJgunguy24]

They can't ignore anything when they can be thrown in prison for wrongly convicting someone. That's what I mean by being held responsible. Too many times I've heard "acting under the color of authority" as a sad excuse for getting away with destroying peoples lives, and it's bullshit.