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2,240 EXONERATIONS
Since the March 2018 Newsletter:
a total of 58 exonerations added
39 new exonerations & 19 newly discovered
including the exoneree who set
the record for longest incarceration
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Misdemeanor Exonerations in the Registry
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 In 1997, 16-year-old Fancy Figueroa was raped by a man who followed her into the family home. When she reported the rape to the police, they did not believe her and pressured her to plead guilty to filing a false police report. She was exonerated in 2004 when the DNA of a man who was convicted of two rapes after 1997 matched the DNA profile that had been developed from the rape kit in Figueroa’s case. Read more. |
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 In September 2009, Harris County, Texas officers seized a substance from Barry Mayfield that field-tested positive for MDMA, a controlled substance better known as ecstasy. Mayfield pled guilty to possession. He was exonerated in 2016 after laboratory tests showed no controlled substance was found. There are 149 Harris County drug possession exonerations; 58 of them were misdemeanors. Read more. |
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Errors in Misdemeanor Adjudication
This article appeared in Volume 98, Number 3 Boston University Law Review
There are millions of misdemeanor convictions each year in the United States. They make up the great majority of all criminal convictions, but only about 4% of exonerations (85/2,145, as of the end of 2017). The reason is simple: exonerations are expensive, time-consuming affairs. The scarce resources they require are generally reserved for convictions that send innocent people to prison for many years. Unlike felony exonerations, the great majority of the few misdemeanor exonerations we know about were for convictions based on guilty pleas, and occurred in cases in which innocent defendants were convicted of crimes that never happened as opposed to crimes committed by other people. Two-thirds involved defendants who pled guilty to misdemeanor drug possession in Harris County (Houston), Texas. They were exonerated because the local crime lab tested seized “drugs” in cases that were closed by their guilty pleas, and no illegal substances were detected. Almost all the misdemeanor exonerations depended on unlikely events that made exoneration cheap and simple—usually forensic tests that law enforcement conducted for their own purposes; sometimes previously unknown videos, or criminal investigations of dishonest police officers. These fortuitous opportunities have produced clusters of misdemeanor exonerations, but without the benefit of such rare events, innocent defendants convicted of misdemeanors are just out of luck. Read more.
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 2018 has so far only seen one misdemeanor exoneration, in the case of Tyler Heffernan. In 2016, Heffernan was sentenced to 30 days in jail for assaulting a man outside a bar in Burlington, Vermont. The conviction was reversed and the charges dismissed in April 2018 based on evidence that he acted in self-defense and that the person who accused him of the assault actually instigated the incident. Read more. |
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 The Registry's database of exonerations that occurred before 1989 does not include any misdemeanor exonerations. However, it does include cases that today would no longer be considered crimes, or are no longer prosecuted. Oscar Krueger was a 33-year-old father when he was falsely convicted of sending an obscene letter in the mail. He was pardoned by President William Howard Taft after handwriting analysis showed he did not send the letter. Read more. |
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