It's slightly higher than the incarceration rate (47% of exonerated prisoners versus 39% of incarcerations). Without digging into greater detail, I wouldn't necessarily conclude that this is odd at all. The bigger issue is how a group that makes up ~13% of the population makes up 39% of those incarcerated. If anything, the relatively closeness of the stats tells us that false convictions can't be the sole (or even primary) reason for that massive difference.
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Sad as that is, the scary thing to me is that the person who probably killed the little girl in NC back then, went on to kill someone else before he was caught. Wrongful convictions don't just victimize the convicted.
Yup. Our criminal justice system isn't perfect. But when you compare the rate of exoneration to total incarcerations, we don't do that bad a job. You also have to balance the potential of allowing a guilty person to get away with it and commit more crimes against the potential of arresting and/or convicting the wrong guy and allowing the real criminal to commit more crimes. Can't just look at one side of things. Yes. Heartless, I know. But the real world rarely wraps up cases in a neat and tidy bow like the crime dramas might have you think. Judgement calls are made all the time. We just usually only hear about when they are wrong.