Being incarcerated for a crime committed by someone else is a tragic injustice that impacts thousands of people and their families nationwide. Wrongful convictions happen in every state, to people of every background, and can take years or even decades to be corrected, taking longer for some groups of people than others. When this happens in Oklahoma City, Josh Lee & Associates is here to fight for our clients and defend their rights to the fullest extent.
To understand the scope of the problem, we analyzed data from the National Registry of Exonerations, which documents more than 3,700 exonerations in the United States from 1989 to the present (July 2026). It also includes over 400 exonerations between 1820 and 1989, but we chose to omit that very sparse dataset due to how incomplete it is.
We broke the data down by state, race, gender, and crime. To ensure our findings reflect true incarceration scales, we developed a standardized exoneration rate for each state based on its average prison population. Keep reading to learn what we discovered.
Key Findings
The findings point to a consistent pattern. Exoneration rates vary widely by state. People of color (POC), and Black exonerees in particular, spend significantly more time incarcerated before their convictions are overturned. And in some states, POC individuals make up a disproportionate share of the wrongfully convicted. Some of our findings include:
- Illinois recorded the highest exoneration rate at 29.12 exonerations per 100,000 prisoners, while South Carolina recorded the lowest in the country.
- Louisiana exonerees face the longest median wait in the country at nearly 15 years, whereas Maine resolves cases the fastest with an average wait of just under a year.
- Official misconduct, false accusations, and mistaken identity are the most frequent contributing factors in wrongful convictions for Black and Hispanic individuals, while false or misleading forensic evidence is more frequently tied to White and Asian exonerations.
- In Illinois, the exoneration rate for POC was 11.02 times the rate for white people, and in Maine and New Hampshire, 100 percent of the recorded exonerations involved white individuals.
- People of color spent a median of 6.8 years incarcerated before their conviction was overturned compared to 4.3 years for white exonerees, with POC men losing an average of over 10 years to wrongful incarceration.
How States Rank for Overall Exonerations
Time served until exoneration tells a different story. Louisiana had the longest median wait in the country at 14.7 years, followed by Nebraska (13.5), Connecticut (12.7), Missouri (11.55), and Pennsylvania (11.4). Maine had the shortest median wait in the country at zero years, with Delaware, North Dakota, Texas, and New Hampshire all at one year or less.
Exonerations by Crime Type
Murder was the single largest category of exonerations, accounting for 1,466 cases and carrying the longest average time lost of any major crime type at 15.6 years.
Drug possession or sale was the second most common category at 648 cases, but carried the shortest average time lost at just 1.2 years, which reflects how many of those cases were cleared in batches rather than through individual appeals.
Sexual assault (376 cases, 12-year average) and child sex abuse (348 cases, 8.3-year average) also carried heavy average time lost. Robbery (180 cases), assault (133 cases), attempted murder (104 cases), weapon possession or sale (76 cases), and manslaughter (70 cases) rounded out the most common categories, with an average time lost between roughly 2.5 and 10.7 years.
States Leading in Exonerations by Crime Type
Exonerations were not evenly spread across crime categories, and neither is where they happened.
By rate per 100,000 residents, the top five states for each major crime type were:
Murder (1,466 cases nationwide):
- Illinois (2.094)
- Louisiana (1.111)
- New York (0.944)
- Pennsylvania (0.902)
- Alaska (0.892)
Drug Possession/Sale (648 cases nationwide):
- Illinois (1.789)
- Texas (1.115)
- New Jersey (0.267)
- Louisiana (0.222)
- Nevada (0.21)
Sexual Assault (376 cases nationwide):
- Montana (0.414)
- Louisiana (0.355)
- West Virginia (0.33)
- Vermont (0.326)
- Wisconsin (0.307)
Child Sex Abuse (348 cases nationwide):
- Montana (0.517)
- South Dakota (0.373)
- Washington (0.324)
- Wisconsin (0.253)
- Oregon (0.245)
Robbery (180 cases nationwide):
- Rhode Island (0.19)
- New York (0.188)
- Vermont (0.163)
- Louisiana (0.156)
- Michigan (0.111)
Assault (133 cases nationwide):
- Mississippi (0.174)
- Vermont (0.163)
- Alaska (0.149)
- North Dakota (0.145)
- South Dakota (0.124)
Attempted Murder (104 cases nationwide):
- Michigan (0.12)
- Illinois (0.10)
- New York (0.09)
- Idaho (0.07)
- Louisiana (0.07)
Weapon Possession or Sale (76 cases nationwide):
- Illinois (0.104)
- New York (0.068)
- California (0.067)
- Virginia (0.052)
- New Jersey (0.046)
Manslaughter (70 cases nationwide):
- New Mexico (0.156)
- South Dakota (0.124)
- Kentucky (0.119)
- Oregon (0.082)
- Hawaii (0.076)
Illinois and Louisiana continuously appeared across categories, and both have a real history behind them. Chicago went through the Jon Burge scandal, where police tortured over 100 mostly Black men into false confessions from the 1970s into the early 1990s, and that alone accounts for a chunk of the state’s murder exonerations.
Louisiana, meanwhile, allowed convictions on a non-unanimous jury vote until 2018, a rule written into the state constitution in 1898 specifically to weaken Black jurors’ voices, so cases could sit for decades before there was even a legal path to challenge them.
Texas’s drug numbers may be associated with a 2013 law that let prisoners appeal convictions based on outdated forensic science, something most states still don’t allow.
What Is Contributing to Wrongful Convictions?
The data reveals that the justice system fails different demographic groups for distinct reasons. Perjury and false accusations are the most common contributing factors across the board, appearing in the majority of wrongful convictions regardless of race.
However, significant disparities emerge in other areas. Official misconduct and mistaken witness identification disproportionately drive wrongful convictions for Black and Hispanic individuals, whereas false or misleading forensic evidence is more frequently tied to white and Asian exonerations.
These underlying causes line up directly with the gaps in time served. Black and Hispanic exonerees, who are most heavily impacted by misconduct and mistaken identity, consistently face the longest waits to have their convictions overturned.
How Do POC Exonerations Compare to White Exonerations?
Beyond overall numbers, we looked at how the exonerated population broke down by race within each state. For every state, we calculated a simple ratio: POC exonerations divided by white exonerations. A ratio of 1.0 means the two groups were exonerated in equal numbers within that state.
Illinois again topped the list, with a ratio of 11.02, meaning POC exonerations outnumbered white exonerations by eleven to one. New Jersey, Louisiana, Maryland, and Mississippi also leaned heavily toward POC exonerations, and each has its own documented history behind it.
Maryland’s numbers track closely with Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force, a group of officers convicted in 2017 of robbery and racketeering after years of planting evidence and framing suspects, which led to roughly 800 cases being reviewed and hundreds of convictions overturned.
New Jersey saw something similar play out in Camden, where a group of officers were caught planting drugs and fabricating arrests, leading courts to overturn convictions for dozens of residents.
Mississippi’s cases connect back to two forensic experts, a coroner and a dentist, who spent decades testifying in murder cases using bite-mark and autopsy methods that were later discredited, and whose work has now been tied to at least ten wrongful convictions.
Maine and New Hampshire recorded no POC exonerations.
A Demographic Breakdown of Who Gets Exonerated
By Race
Black individuals accounted for the largest share of exonerations at 2,041 cases, followed by white individuals (1,181), Hispanic individuals (486), Asian individuals (34), Native American individuals (28), and a small “other” category (19).
Native American exonerees showed the highest median time lost of any group at 11.65 years, followed by Black exonerees at 7.3 years. White exonerees had a 4.3-year median, less than half of the Native American figure. Hispanic exonerees fell in between at a 9-year average and a 5.6-year median. The Native American and Asian sample sizes are small, so those figures are worth reporting but should be read with more caution than the Black and white comparisons, which rest on much larger case counts.
By Race and Sex
POC men lost more time than any other group in the dataset, averaging 10.52 years, well above the 8.21-year average for white men. POC women showed the shortest average time of any group at 4.19 years, close to white women’s 4.52-year average. The race gap and the gender gap don’t move together in a simple way. Being a POC man appears to carry the steepest cost in time lost, while POC women don’t follow that same pattern in this dataset.
Does This Point to Wrongful Convictions of POC Individuals?
A high POC-to-white ratio by itself in a state does not prove that state is more biased in who it wrongfully convicts. A state with a larger Black or Hispanic population will naturally produce more POC exonerations than a state that is mostly white, even if wrongful convictions happen at the same underlying rate across every group.
However, looking at the ratios alongside how long people actually wait to be exonerated builds a stronger case. Nationally, POC exonerees spent an average of 10.13 years incarcerated before their conviction was overturned, compared to 7.7 years for white exonerees.
The causes behind these wrongful convictions differ by race as well. Official misconduct, meaning police, prosecutors, or other officials acting improperly in a case, is present in 66.1% of Black exonerees’ cases, compared to 51.8% of white exonerees’ cases. Mistaken witness identification appears in 33.3% of Black exonerees’ cases, double the 14.7% rate for white exonerees.
Taken individually, none of these numbers prove bias in any single case. Taken together, a pattern where POC individuals wait longer to be exonerated and are more often convicted through official misconduct or mistaken identification becomes harder to dismiss as coincidence.
Illinois deserves a specific note here. A large share of its numbers comes from roughly 219 Chicago-area drug possession convictions that mostly involved Black defendants and were thrown out after officers were found to have fabricated cases. Those exonerations moved quickly because they were processed in batches rather than fought individually through the courts. That single scandal is real and serious on its own, but it also means Illinois’s numbers say more about one police unit’s misconduct than about a broader pattern across the state’s courts.
Conclusion
More than four thousand people in this dataset were convicted of crimes they did not commit. What the numbers show is that getting a conviction overturned depends heavily on where the case happened and who the person is. POC individuals, and Black men most of all, wait longer than anyone else to have their innocence recognized. A handful of states, Illinois chief among them, account for a disproportionate share of the country’s POC exonerations, sometimes because of a specific scandal and sometimes for reasons that point to something more structural.
This data cannot speak to what happened in any one case, and it should not be read as an accusation against a specific prosecutor, department, or state. What it does show is where the deeper questions are worth asking. When official misconduct and mistaken identification appear far more often in Black exonerees’ cases, and that gap lines up with an equally real gap in how long people wait to be cleared, that is not a coincidence. It is a pattern worth taking seriously.
Methodology
This study is based on the full case-level dataset from the National Registry of Exonerations (4,318 cases, 1989 to July 2026), cross-referenced with average state prison population figures from 1989 through 2021 and US Census Population Data to calculate rate-based comparisons.
Race was grouped into six categories as classified by the registry, with cases marked “Don’t Know” excluded from race-based calculations, and the POC-to-white ratio reflects a raw count comparison rather than a rate adjusted for each state’s racial population breakdown, since that data was not available for this analysis. All figures in this study were calculated directly from the registry dataset and cross-checked against the source files before publication.
