A fundamental tenet of justice is that the innocent should not be punished. But our system is not perfect – it can, and does, make mistakes. Nowhere are the consequences of these mistakes more serious and irreversible than with the death penalty. Wrongful convictions present a significant public safety problem, too: when the innocent are convicted, the guilty go free.
As the resources on this page show, the problem goes back decades, and persists to this day – 6 people were exonerated from death row last year alone. There have been 156 people released from death rows across the country in the last four decades due to evidence of innocence.