Wrongfully Accused: The Exoneration of Black People

Dr. Yohuru Williams believes society’s current revisiting of wrongful convictions, lynchings and unsolved murders, all created a perfect storm. “In the aftermath of that, it was some real energy behind ‘Oh, this, this is an issue.’ I think this was the case with the Groveland Four, certainly the case with the gentlemen who were ultimately exonerated in the Malcolm X case.”

Aziz and Islam were the two men convicted in the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, both of their cases were vacated on November 18, 2021, in a courtroom in Manhattan. Aziz is now 83 and spent 22 years in prison. Islam was posthumously exonerated as he died in 2009.

In the case of both of these men, one of the contributing factors that led to them being exonerated was mistaken witness identification. Of the 81 Black men exonerated in 2021, mistaken witness identification was a factor in 33 of the Black exonerees, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Barbara O’Brien, a professor at Michigan State University College of Law and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, points out that humans are not good at eye witness identification, in particular cross-racial identification.

Although Dr. Williams points out that the murder of George Floyd put some fire behind getting “essential justice” for African Americans, he also thinks the whole notion can be problematic. “Kevin Strickland is a great example. You get out when you’re 60 and so what? The problem is that these individuals become totems to the justice system, and the stories actually work in the opposite, because it’s almost mocking what just happened, and it took this long. It’s a cautionary tale that this can happen to you too. So they don’t become moments that we can celebrate how swiftly our system works. They become moments where you go if I’m a man of color, and I’m looking at all these cases and going, ‘damn, I pray that I don’t wind up in that situation because there’s no guarantee no matter how much evidence there is, as there was in Strickland’s case, to indicate that I’m not guilty of this, I may never get out.”

On November 23, 2021, Strickland’s conviction was vacated and he was released at 62 after spending 43 years in prison.

Strickland was convicted of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder. A total of 44 of the Black exonerees in 2021 were convicted of murder, 36 of those exonerees were sentenced to life or worse.

O’Brien asserts that in cases of wrongful convictions, someone is often found guilty based on eyewitness identification.

“Human beings are terrible, just in general at eyewitness identification. But they’re even worse when it’s people of another race.”

Although most of us think a Black defendant is already more likely to be wrongly convicted than a White defendant, the numbers support the belief.

Anthony Broadwater was accused of raping Syracuse University student Alice Sebold in May 1981, who is now a best-selling author. He was convicted in May 1982 of first-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse, first-degree sodomy, first-degree robbery, and assault and was sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison. He was released on parole in December 1998, a total of sixteen years after he was convicted. In November 2021, Broadwater’s conviction was vacated by a judge in Onondaga County.

In the most recent Race and Wrongful Convictions Report from the National Registry of Exonerations, it was found that a Black prisoner serving time for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a White sexual assault convict. The major factor is the misidentification of Black defendants by White victims. In half of all sexual assault exonerations where mistaken identification was a factor, the defendant was Black and the victim was White. This was the case in the exoneration of Anthony Broadwater.

The discrepancies are similar when it comes to wrongful convictions of murder. Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than White people and on average Black exonerees convicted of murder spend three years longer in prison before release than White exonerees convicted of murder. It is also more likely for police misconduct to be a factor in murder exonerations when the defendant is Black compared to if they are White.

In 2006, Juwan Deering was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of arson for a fire that occurred in April 2000 and killed five children in Royal Oak Township, Michigan. Deering was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

On September 21, 2021, Deering’s convictions were vacated by an Oakland County circuit court judge. On September 30, 2021, Deering was released from prison after charges were dismissed. He later filed a compensation claim against the state of Michigan for the 15 years he spent in prison.

Convicted of murder, robbery, and possession of an instrument of a crime, Curtis Crosland was sentenced to life without parole in 1988. It took thirty three years for him to be exonerated in 2021.

One of the major causes of the high number of Black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the Black community. Black prisoners who are convicted of murder are about 50 percent more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers, with the race of the defendant being a major factor in the disparity.

The Groveland Four were a group of Black men who were accused of kidnapping and raping a 17-year-old White teenager in Groveland, Florida in 1949. It took 72 years for them to be exonerated by a judge. Unfortunately, none of the four were alive to see the day that they’d be set free as they were all posthumously exonerated.

When asked how people can contribute and ensure that wrongful convictions of Black people decrease, Dr. Williams urges people to educate themselves. “If you’re familiar with or aware of infamous cases don’t pass up petitions, when they come through, attach your name to that. If you have an innocence project that is operating in your city or your state, find a way to get involved, even if it’s something as simple as contributing funds. Or if you have time, work with those projects, they can always use human power to get that work done. If you’re aware of stories, share them.”

Dr. Williams also says essential justice mustn’t be the stop-gap, more reform has to occur. “The problem with essential justice is that everybody gets to come to the ceremony and take a bow and say, ‘See, we did the right thing.’ It may exonerate those individuals in the eyes of history, but it does nothing in the contemporary moment, to force us to look at the system as it presently exists and work to reform within that system. So I think that we have to, in a very deliberate way, link that those acts of historical recovery then say, and this is what this looks like today. And here’s how we need to take action. It’s the connection of the Groveland Four, to the Central Park Jogger case.”