On July 1, after waiting 41 years for his name to be cleared, Larry Roberts became the 200th person exonerated from death row. A new Death Penalty Information Center analysis finds that Mr. Roberts’ experience illustrates a troubling trend: for innocent death-sentenced prisoners, the length of time between wrongful conviction and exoneration is increasing. In the past twenty years, the average length of time before exoneration has roughly tripled, and 2024 has the highest-ever average wait before exoneration, at 38.7 years. Our research suggests that two of the factors contributing to this phenomenon are procedural rules restricting prisoner appeals and resistance by state officials to credible claims of innocence.
Our Innocence Database tracks people who were exonerated since 1973, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia invalidated the nation’s death penalty statutes and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row. The earliest death sentence in our database was in 1963. As a result, it makes sense that the average length of time before exoneration would increase to some degree since the beginning of our dataset; a person exonerated in 1973 would have spent a maximum of 10 years on death row, while a person exonerated today could have spent over 50 years. However, one would expect that with a functioning legal system that properly identifies wrongful convictions, the number would plateau regardless of the maximum time spent on death row. For example, if the appeals process consistently identified wrongful convictions within 15 years, the average time on death row would increase until the late 1970s, at which point the data would show a relatively stable horizontal line around the 15-year mark through today. Instead, the average length of time has skyrocketed, especially since the early 2000s. As the years pass, people continue to be exonerated who were sentenced to death at the very beginning of the modern death penalty era. Last year, Oklahoma released Glynn Simmons, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1975. He endured more than 48 years of appeals in which courts ignored and turned away his pleas of innocence.
Though the development of DNA testing has greatly assisted in the identification of decades-old wrongful convictions, the availability of DNA evidence does not appear to significantly affect the trend. Only one-sixth of death row exonerations involved DNA. Many capital convictions did not rely on any physical forensic evidence, and when evidence was collected that could be tested for DNA, it may have been improperly stored, contaminated, or lost under the state’s care. Further, many prisoners have difficulty accessing crime scene evidence over the objections of prosecutors so they can test it for DNA in post-conviction proceedings. The distribution of DNA exonerations in our analysis tracks the overall distribution of exonerations, with trendlines showing only a marginal difference—and importantly, the vast majority of the longest-serving exonerated cases did not involve DNA. “DNA is not the answer,” said Ray Krone, a DNA death row exoneree and co-founder of Witness to Innocence, upon Mr. Roberts becoming the 200th exoneree. Mr. Krone said that DNA exonerations “are like a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to the harder to prove factors that cause most wrongful capital convictions.”
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