Milestone: Exonerated Defendants Spent
20,000 Years in Prison
Governments paid more than $2.2 billion in compensation, butmore than half of those exonerated received nothing
In August 2018, the National Registry of Exonerations passed a milestone: The number of “years
lost” that exonerated defendants spent in prison for crimes they did not commit exceeded 20,000.
The total now stands at 20,080 years, on average more than 8 years 10 months in prison for eachof the 2,265 exonerees in the Registry. Innocent black defendants served a majority of the 20,080
years unjustly lost to prison.
It’s impossible to fully grasp the magnitude of the injustice and suffering these numbers represent:
careers and opportunities that were lost forever; children who grew up and parents who died while
the innocent defendants were in prison; marriages that fell apart—or never happened. How can
one understand, let alone quantify, the loneliness, pain, indignity, danger, and hopelessness of life
in prison as an innocent person?
Here's one case:
In March 1971, Richard Phillips and Fred Mitchell were arrested in Detroit for anarmed robbery that Mitchell committed, but an eyewitness mistakenly identified
Phillips, who was convicted.
In March 1972, Mitchell became the lead suspect in the murder of his brother-inlaw, Gregory Harris, because a gun that was seized from him was linked to thebullets that killed Harris. Mitchell told the police that he helped Phillips andRichard Palombo commit the murder. In October 1972, based solely on Mitchell’s
testimony, Phillips and Palombo were sentenced to life in prison with no possibilityof parole. At trial, Mitchell falsely swore he had no deal with the prosecution, andthe prosecutors let that lie stand.
Phillips was released in 2017 after Palombo finally admitted that he had killed
Harris with Mitchell. Palombo testified that he never met Phillips until after they
were both arrested for the Harris murder.
Richard Phillips was 26 when he was falsely convicted of the murder of Gregory
Harris, and nearly 72 when he was released. He had spent 45 years and two months
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in prison. His children were 47 and 49; they had been two and four when he waslast free. Phillips said he had expected to be “going to the [prison] graveyard … but
that’s not going to happen now.”
The National Registry of Exonerations reports every known exoneration in the United States since
1989, a total of 2,265 as of August 29, 2018. Richard Phillips served more time in prison for acrime he did not commit than any other defendant in the Registry, but several others are closebehind. Ledura Watkins, who was also exonerated in 2017 of a false murder conviction in Detroit,
spent 41 years 3 months in prison, and 34 other exonerees served 30 to 39 years.
For Richard Phillips, Ledura Watkins, and hundreds of others who spent decades behind bars, thedevastation is plain. But even exonerees who served little or no time did not get off easy.
On January 29, 1970, 19-year-old Malcolm Emory, a Native American physics
student on a full scholarship at Northeastern University in Boston, was beaten up
by police and arrested near an anti-Vietnam war demonstration. He was convicted
when an officer (who later pled guilty to accepting bribes) testified that Emory hit
him with a brick.
Emory was sentenced to probation, but he lost his scholarship—which came fromthe U.S. Navy—and his security clearance. He was also forced to resign his job at
the United States Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory, and had to drop out ofschool. Instead of a career as a physicist, he held a series of jobs as an apple-picker,
welder, and ironworker.
Emory was exonerated in 1990 because he managed to locate an unpublishednewspaper photograph that shows him at age 19, on the ground, being beaten bypolice, clutching—as he had testified—not a brick, but a stack of library books.
Unfortunately, the 2,265 exonerations we know about only begin to tell the story of wrongfulconvictions and the terrible toll they take. There are many exonerations from past years that we
don’t know about—we keep finding them when we have time to look—and the vast majority offalse convictions are never recognized at all.
Years Lost by Crime and by Race
In general, the length of time exonerated defendants spent in prison reflects the severity of thecrimes for which they were wrongly convicted. The average time lost ranges from 1.3 years for
drug crime exonerations to 13.2 years for murder exonerations.1
1

See Table A:
Table A: Average Number of Years Lost per Exoneration,
by Race and CrimeP A G E | 2 OF 11

Black

White

Hispanic

Other

ALL CRIMES

10.7

7.4

7.2

6.9

ALL RACES
8.9

MurderSexual Assault
Child Sex Abuse
Drug Crimes
Robbery
Other

14.7
13.6
12.0
1.4
6.5
4.6

11.6
9.6
6.8
0.8
5.6
2.7

11.6
9.8
6.9
1.6
4.5
3.2

15.3
11.3
5.1
0.1
8.1
2.7

13.2
12.0
8.1
1.3
6.1
3.4

NATIONAL REGISTRY OF EXONERATIONSNEWKIRK CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
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Black exonerees spent an average of 10.7 years in prison, about 45% more than white exonerees,
who averaged 7.4 years. This pattern holds for each major category of crime for which theexonerees were convicted.2 African Americans are greatly over-represented among innocent
defendants who have been exonerated, and even more so for time spent in prison for crimes they
did not commit. They account for 12% of the population, 46% of exonerees, and 56% of all lost
years served by exonerated defendants.3
Compensation
One imperfect but highly important measure of the cost of these false convictions that end inexoneration is the compensation that exonerees receive for their ordeals. Professor Jeffrey Gutmanof the George Washington University Law School has just completed the second part of acomprehensive study of the compensation received by exonerees in the Registry.4 He focuses inpart on compensation for years lost to wrongful imprisonment.
Professor Gutman and his colleague Lingxiao Sun studied the 1,900 exonerations in state courtsthat were posted in the Registry as of March 1, 2017. These 1,900 exonerations totaled 17,193 lost
years, about 86% of the total in the Registry as of August 29, 2018.5
The set of compensation awards Gutman studied is, inevitably, incomplete. In some cases, claims
for compensation were still pending when data collection closed; in others, no claims had yet been
filed but the time to do so had not run out. As time passes, additional compensation will be awarded
to some exonerees in these groups. Nonetheless, Professor Gutman’s work provides anextraordinarily valuable view of the field.

2

See Table A, supra, note 1. We found a similar pattern of differences between black and Hispanic exonerees, but weare not confident of the accuracy of the classification of exonerees as “Hispanic” in a substantial number of cases.
3
See Table B:
Table B: Percentage of Exonerations and of Years Lost, by Race

NUMBER OF YEARSLOSTNUMBER OF
EXONERATIONSALL CRIMES

Black

White

Hispanic

Other

ALL RACES

46% (1,051)

39% (885)

12% (277)

2% (52)

100% (2,265)

56% (11,207)

32% (6,519)

10% (1,996)

2% (358)

100% (20,080)

Murder56% (6,593)

31% (3,603)

11% (1,271)

2% (214)

100% (11,681)

Sexual Assault

67% (2,539)

27% (1,038)

5% (206)

1% (34)

100% (3,817)

Child Sex Abuse

37% (768)

53% (1,113)

9% (187)

1% (20)100% (2,089)

Drug Crimes

63% (202)

15% (48)22% (71)

0% (0.4)

100% (321)

Robbery

66% (468)

20% (140)

11% (77)

3% (24)

100% (709)

Other

44% (637)

39% (577)

13% (184)

4% (65)

100% (1,463)

4

Jeffrey S. Gutman and Lingxiao Sun, “Why is Mississippi the Best State in Which to be Exonerated? An Empirical
Evaluation of State Statutory and Civil Compensation for the Wrongly Convicted,” forthcoming in the Northeastern
University Law Review, Vol. XY (2019).
5

In addition to the cases studied by Gutman and Sun, the current total for all cases in the Registry includes 109
exonerees who were convicted in federal court and 256 state-court exonerees whose cases were posted after March 1,
2017.
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Gutman examined two forms of compensation: (i) no-fault statutory compensation for wrongfulimprisonment, now available in thirty-three states which among them account for 88% of statecourt exonerations; and (ii) verdicts and settlements in civil law suits for damages for deprivationof federal civil rights or other misconduct by government officials that led to the wrongfulconvictions.
Combining these two modes of compensation, Gutman found that:•

State and municipal governments have paid more than $2.2 billion in compensation—$537
million in statutory awards for wrongful imprisonment and $1.7 billion in judgments andsettlements in civil lawsuits.

•

Only about 44% of exonerees received any compensation for the damage to their lives;
56% have received nothing, at least so far.6•

The compensation paid covers slightly more than 60% of all the years lost by exonerees,at an average rate of almost $220,000 per year in prison.7

Awards under state compensation statutes are largely determined by formulas based on the lengthof the wrongful imprisonment, but judgments and settlements in civil suits are less predictable.
Among those who successfully sued for civil damages, black exonerees received on average about$290,000 per year of incarceration, compared to $332,000 per year for white exonerees.
Two billion, two hundred million dollars is a lot of money in any setting—and especially in thecontext of the chronically underfunded criminal justice system—but it’s nothing close to adequate
compensation for the suffering these exonerees endured. Would anybody voluntarily agree tospend 10 years in prison in return for a million dollars, or even two or three million? Even so, thatsum provides nothing to 56% of exonerated defendants—and nothing to the many thousands ofinnocent defendants who spend years or decades in prison but are never exonerated.
Conclusion
It’s probably impossible to stop all convictions of innocent defendants, but we can certainly do
better than what we see here. Some of the causes of false convictions are well known—eyewitness
misidentifications, false confessions, perjury by witnesses who stand to benefit from their
testimony, false or misleading forensic evidence—and there are well known reforms that might
greatly reduce the harm these factors cause.8 They seem like distinct issues, but there is a common
thread: it costs money to do a good job of investigating and judging criminal guilt. Police,

6

About 39% of exonerees in states with compensation statutes received statutory compensation. About 24% of all
exonerees received compensation from civil lawsuits.
7
Almost half of the years lost by exonerees in states with wrongful imprisonment statutes were compensated underthose schemes, at an average rate almost $70,000 per year lost. Only about 32% of the years lost by all exonerees werecompensated in civil law suits at a rate of about $307,000 for each lost year.
8See, for example, the discussion of these issues by the Innocence Project and by the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
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prosecutors, defense attorneys, and courts across the country operate with inadequate funds,
insufficient staff, lax supervision, and poor training.
Richard Phillips’ case is a good example. He was ultimately released because the head of the newly
created Conviction Integrity Unit at the Detroit prosecutor’s office confirmed that the trial
testimony of Fred Mitchell, the main prosecution witness, was a tissue of lies. Mitchell testified toseveral meetings with Richard Palombo, Phillips’ codefendant, that could not have happened
because Palombo was in prison on the dates they supposedly met.
Phillips would never have gone to trial if someone in the prosecutor’s office had checked out
Mitchell’s story in 1972 instead of 2018. He might never have been arrested if the police had done
so. And he would never have been convicted if his defense attorney had done a routine review ofprison records before cross-examining Mitchell. Instead, Richard Phillips was shuffled off toprison for life after a quick, cheap investigation and a sad excuse for a trial.
In justice, as in other realms, you get what you pay for. Are we willing to pay for accuracy andfairness? Or have we concluded that sending thousands of innocent defendants to prison for tensof thousands of years is a tolerable error rate? That billions of dollars in compensation, and untold
misery that can never be undone, are acceptable costs?

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Longest Serving Exonerees
While the average time lost per exoneree is 8.9 years for each of the 2,265 men and women in the
National Registry of Exonerations, 35 men each spent more than 30 years in prison before they
were exonerated of crimes they did not commit. The list of these men and their time served fromconviction until release is on the Registry website at:https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/longestincarceration.aspx
Below are thumbnail sketches of six of these men who were freed in the past two years after
spending an extraordinary amount of time in prison. They have agreed to be interviewed about
their time inside. The interviews must be coordinated with their contact person—typically theirlawyer. That contact information is included below.

1.

Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips spent 45 years and two months inprison after he was convicted of murder in 1972 in
Detroit, Michigan. By the time he was released after
being exonerated in 2017, he had spent more years inprison than any other wrongly convicted defendant in
U.S. history. When he was released just a few weeks
before turning 72, he had not seen his children in 45
years. They were ages 2 and 4 when he was convicted.
On the day he was released, Phillips (who refused totake a plea deal for release) said, “I expected toprobably to just, you know, just say, sayonara to a lotof you all going to the graveyard in Cherry Hill, but
that’s not going to happen now.” Cherry Hill
Cemetery, on Michigan Department of Corrections property in Jackson, often is the burial place
for indigent prisoners who die in custody.

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2.

Malcolm Alexander
In 1980, Malcolm Alexander was wrongly convictedof sexual assaulting the owner of an antique store in
Gretna, Louisiana. He was exonerated by DNA
testing and released in January 2018 after serving 37
years and three months in prison. A day later, the dog
he raised at Angola Penitentiary and named “Inn”(after the Innocence Project) was released as well. He
was one of the lucky ones—his 82-year-old motherwas still alive to greet him.

Malcolm Alexander (left) and his son, Malcolm Stewart
with Vanessa Potkin(left), Innocence Project, and Emily
Maw, Innocence Project New Orleans

3.

Mark Jones, Dominic Lucci, Kenneth GardinerMark Jones

Dominic Lucci

Kenneth Gardiner

On January 31, 1992, the night before he was to be married in the chapel at Fort Stewart, Georgia,

20-year-old Mark Jones and two of his friends, Dominic Lucci and Kenneth Gardiner, werearrested in Savannah, Georgia for a murder they did not commit. They were released on bond in
December 2017 and exonerated in July 2018 after serving 25 years in prison—losing some of themost productive years of their lives.

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4.

Marshall HaleIn 1984, 24-year-old Marshall Hale was convicted ofrape in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania even though theprosecution had biological evidence excluding him
as the rapist. By the time he was exonerated in July
2017, he had spent 32 years and nine months inprison. The prosecution discovered the evidence
excluding him in 2010, but spent the next seven years
fighting his exoneration.

5.

Frederick ClayIn August 2017, nearly 38 years after Frederick Clay wasarrested at age 16 in Boston, Massachusetts for a murder
he did not commit, Clay was exonerated and released. He
emerged into a world vastly different from theenvironment he knew when he was only half way throughhis teenage years-a world he virtually only knows fromwatching television.

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6.

Craig Coley
Craig Coley was 31 years old when he was charged
with murdering his girlfriend and her four-year-old
son in Simi Valley, California. He was exonerated
in November 2017—at age 70, having spent nearly
38 years in prison after his conviction in 1980. His
exoneration was largely the work of a police officer,
Mike Bender, who came to conclude that Coley was
innocent. When Coley left prison, he had no savings,
no photo ID, no driver’s license, no credit rating andno possessions. He did have a college degree earned
behind bars.

Craig Coley and retired police officer Mike Bender

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Table 1: Exonerations, Years Lost in Prison and Compensation, by Jurisdiction
YEARS SPENT IN PRISON BY EXONERATED
DEFENDANTS
National Registry of Exonerations
2265 Exonerations as of August 28, 2018

Jurisdiction
Alabama
AlaskaArizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
DelawareDistrict ofColumbia
FloridaGeorgia
Guam
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
KansasKentuckyLouisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
MichiganMinnesota
Mississippi
MissouriMontana
Nebraska
NevadaNew Hampshire
New Jersey
P A G E | 10 OF 11

Number of
Exonerations

COMPENSATION
Gutman Study, 1,900 state-court exonerations
as of March 1, 2017

% of
% of Years Lost
Exonerated
For Which
Total Number of Defendants Compensation
Years Lost
CompensatedWas Paid

Total Amount
Paid

26
8
19
8
191
8
23
2

183
70
138
44
1652
83
265
6

19%
0%
11%
17%
41%
29%
55%
0%

23%
0%
14%
22%
58%
33%
68%
0%

$
2,320,141$$
4,550,000$
200,000$ 158,264,667$
11,200,000$
48,080,000
$
-

16

279

44%

63%

$

64
35
1
3
3
221
35
14
10
14
52
3
27
62
87
14
18
46
14
9
13
1
37

588
350
1
28
37
2,493
317
79
88
137
796
3
304
676
754
28
210
501
153
101
175
4
374

25%
21%
0%
33%
50%
73%
33%
21%
57%
27%
66%
0%
25%
67%
32%
27%
81%
38%
22%
78%
44%
0%
48%

40%
43%
0%
66%
52%
79%
29%
68%
33%
29%
66%
0%
36%
83%
37%
44%
90%
46%
35%
85%
29%
0%
48%

$
21,851,901$
5,050,000
$
$
7,500
$
900,000$ 478,819,063$
14,090,000$
18,397,812$
7,900,000$
20,600,000$
17,921,520$$
26,809,900$ 151,789,000$
35,431,151$
1,740,437$
21,657,333$
53,838,900$
3,530,000$
30,710,000$
6,800,000$$
16,692,868

56,754,027

NATIONAL REGISTRY OF EXONERATIONSNEWKIRK CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE
IRVINE, CALIFORNIA 92697

New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
OregonPennsylvania
Puerto Rico
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
FederalALL CASESP A G E | 11 OF 11

6
250
60
4
65
35
17
64
6
6
7
4
21
344
16
2
51
48
10
52
4
109
2265 Exonerations

36
2,542
740
11
808
340
71
710
83
27
70
15
216
1,937
85
17
436
236
102
388
30
261
20,080 Years

0%
60%
51%
0%
59%
44%
13%
18%
33%
20%
0%
0%
22%
30%
43%
100%
63%
48%
80%
31%
33%
44%

0%
74%
63%
0%
68%
71%
24%
26%
11%
27%
0%
0%
28%
69%
73%
100%
83%
58%
69%
44%
7%
60%

$
$ 647,192,947$
61,931,275$$
57,787,573$
49,820,000$
2,000,000$
26,071,894
unknown$
600,000$$$
1,708,036$ 126,211,632$
1,345,933$
1,550,000$
18,434,681$
23,166,699$
12,100,000$
10,040,417$
1,250,000$ 2,257,117,306

NATIONAL REGISTRY OF EXONERATIONSNEWKIRK CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE
IRVINE, CALIFORNIA 92697