National Registry of Exonerations
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Innocents Who Plead Guilty
About 95% of felony convictions in the United States (and at least as many
misdemeanor convictions) are obtained by guilty pleas, but only 15% of known
exonerees pled guilty (261/1,702). It would be comforting to conclude that
defendants who plead guilty are far less likely to be innocent than those who areconvicted at trial, but it’s not true.

Wayne Washington
pled guilty to murder in 1996
exonerated in 2015
(photo from Freedom For All)

Bobby Johnson
pled guilty to murder in 2007
exonerated in 2015
(photo from New Haven Register)

Shawn Whirlpled guilty to murder in 1991
exonerated in 2015
( photo by Lewis Marien)

Glenn Tinney
pled guilty to murder in 2001
exonerated 2015
(photo from thetowntalk.com)

Innocent defendants who plead guilty have an exceptionally hard time
convincing anybody of their innocence, or even getting a hearing. Judges,
prosecutors, police officers, journalists, friends, lawyers, even innocenceorganizations are all less likely to believe in the innocence of a defendant whopleads guilty. Procedural obstacles prevent these defendants from filing appeals,petitioning for consideration of
new evidence, obtaining DNA
Table 1: Proportions of Exonerations withtesting.
Convictions that Were Based on Guilty Pleas
And innocent defendants whoplead guilty almost always get
lighter sentences than those
who are convicted at trial –that’s why they plead guilty – sothere is less incentive to pursue
exoneration. In many cases, theywould rather put the injusticebehind them than engage inprolonged legal battles to provetheir innocence.
Table 1 shows the proportions ofguilty pleas among the first
1,700 exoneration in the(N=1,700)
CRIME

Exoneration withGuilty Pleas

Homicide

8% (61/732)

MurderManslaughter

Sexual Assaults
Sexual assault of an adultChild sex abuse

Drug crimes
Robbery
Sex Offender Registration

6% (44/697)
49% (17/35)

8% (37/466)
4% (12/277)
13% (25/189)

66% (105/159)
12% (11/94)
78% (7/9)

ALL EXONERATIONS

15% (261/1,700)

NON-DRUG
EXONERATIONS

10% (156/1,541)

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P age |2Registry, for all cases and for those crimes that have more than 5 suchexonerations.
As the Table 1 shows, two-thirds of drug-crime exonerations include guilty pleas.
Only 9% of exonerations are for drug crimes, but drug crimes comprise 40% of
all guilty-plea cases (105/261).1
Most of this bulge is recent: 57% of known drug-crime exonerations occurred in2014 and 2015 (90/159), and 90% of these recent drug cases are based on guilty
pleas (81/90). In fact 67% of drug/guilty-plea exonerations are not only recent butfrom a single jurisdiction. Since early 2014 there have been 71 drug
exonerations in Harris County (Houston), Texas, and the defendants pledguilty in every one of them.
As we’ve discussed“Drug testing after guilty pleas is highly unusual, but elsewhere, most of theseit’s a regular practice in Harris County. If it were done defendants accepted plea
bargains to possession ofacross the country we would no doubt learn ofillegal “drugs” because
thousands of unknown false drug convictions.”
they faced months in jailbefore trial, and years
more if convicted. They were exonerated when crime labs tested those “drugs”
after conviction and found no controlled substances.
Drug testing after guilty pleas is highly unusual,
but it’s a regular practice in Harris County. If it
were done across the country we would no doubt
learn of thousands of unknown false drugconvictions. And of course hundreds ofthousands of additional defendants plead
guilty every year to avoid pre-trial detention
in non-drug cases. It’s anyone’s guess how
many are innocent, but judging from drug pleas
in Harris County it’s a lot.

Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson(photo from Houston Chronicle)

Because of this recent one-county cluster of exonerations, Table 1 also displays theproportion of guilty-plea cases among non-drug exonerations: 10% (156/1,541).
Excluding drug cases, most guilty-plea exonerations are for homicide or sexualassault, two categories that account for 70% of all known exonerations. The1

The highest proportion of guilty pleas—78%—is among the small group of exonerees who were convicted offailing to register as sex offenders (7/9). The reason seems to be that most of them thought they were guilty (eventhough they may have failed to register by mistake) only to be exonerated when it was determined that they were
under no duty to register.

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proportion of guilty pleas for both types of exoneration is 8%, a bit below theoverall rate for non-drug cases.
The proportion among adult sexual assault exonerations is particularly low,4%. Perhaps avoiding the stigma of a sex-crime conviction is so important that
few innocent rape defendants plead guilty unless they can plead to non-sex
crimes—and those that do plead guilty to non-sex crimes avoid reopening theircases. We don’t know.
Almost three-quarters of homicide exonerees who pled guilty were convictedof murder (44/61). It appears that the great majority did so to avoid the risk ofexecution. All but 2 were prosecuted in death penalty states, and 70% had
falsely confessed (31/44) which greatly increases the risk of conviction. They allavoided the death penalty, but the sentences they did receive were stiff: 14 weresentenced to life or life without parole, the rest got sentences that averaged 22years.
Table 2: Proportion of Homicide
Exonerations with Guilty Pleas
by Crime and Penalty
MURDERP DeathE
N Life Without ParoleALLifeT
Y Sentences Less Than Life

0%(0/115)

1%(1/72)

6%(13/211)

10% (30/299)

The remaining 17 homicide
exonerees pled guilty tomanslaughter. They faced lesser
risks—more than a third were innon-death penalty states (6/17),
fewer than a quarter had falsely
confessed (4/17) —and theyreceived much lighter sentences:
the average was 12 years; none
were sentenced to life.

Almost all manslaughter guiltyplea exonerations started as
murder cases and were plea bargained down to manslaughter—which
accounts for the high rate of guilty pleas among the comparatively small number ofmanslaughter exonerations, 49% (17/35). This is one piece of a general pattern
across homicide exonerations.
MANSLAUGHTER

49% (17/35)

As we see in Table 2, the harsher the penalty for homicide exonerees, the fewer
the guilty pleas.
No innocent defendant that we know of pled guilty to homicide and got themaximum punishment in return. There are zero guilty-plea exonerations with death
sentences and only one plea to life without parole, Johnny Lee Wilson in Missouri
who could have been sentenced to death. Below that, the more prosecutors werewilling to sweeten the deal, the higher the proportion of exonerated homicide

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defendants who pled guilty: 6% for life with parole, 10% for lesser (but long)terms of imprisonment for murder, 49% for manslaughter.