Cases against 692 people were dismissed, reversed.
AB Wire
A startling new study in California found that taxpayers spent an estimated $282 million over 24 years, when adjusted for inflation, on wrongful convictions by the state – cases that were either later dismissed or reverses upon retrial.
According to the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, which released the study last week, the cost was determined calculating not just the settlements paid to innocent defendants, but the unnecessary costs of prosecuting and incarcerating them, plus the total legal bills of their criminal trials and appeals.
Beginning the project in 2012 and working backwards to 1989, the study found 692 people who were convicted of felonies in California but whose cases were later dismissed or acquitted on retrial, reported The Washington Post. Those people spent a total of 2,346 years in custody and cost California taxpayers an estimated $282 million when adjusted for inflation.
Those 692 failed convictions over 24 years were part of a California system that convicts more than 200,000 people every year, the Post noted.
The researchers also note that they almost certainly did not find every case where a conviction was reversed, and that some county courthouses in California were more difficult than others to extract data from over the three-year project. Both state and federal courts were used, and the study did not include cases where defendants were tried and acquitted, or arrested but later had charges dismissed.
The study also documented that taxpayers shelled out $68 million in civil settlements. Of the 692 exonerated defendants, 85 emerged from the Rampart scandal of Los Angeles police corruption in the late 1990s.
Read the story in the Post: