The Overrepresentation Of Black And Indigenous People Who Are Wrongfully Convicted In North America’s Criminal Justice System

To this day we still see people being wrongfully convicted in our criminal justice system. A wrongful conviction can occur when a person is found guilty of a crime they didn’t commit. Wrongful convictions tend to affect marginalized groups more than others, as Indigenous peoples and Black people are over represented in American and Canadian wrongful convictions registries. A lot of the time wrongful convictions happen for reasons like racial biases, systemic injustice, unreliable witness testimonies, and the long uphill legal battle of appealing a conviction on the basis of factual innocence.

In the US, African Americans are about 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than a person who isn’t a minority, and most of the time it's for serious crimes like murder.  

Wrongful murder conviction registry sites in the US show that about 56% of the people on the list are Black and many were executed before they were exonerated by the courts. There have been too many cases of people wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for decades before being proven innocent, another area in which marginalized people are over represented 

 Canada’s justice system is just as racist as the US with their deep-routed inequity in their system. A group of Indigenous law students created Canada's first registry of wrongful convictions. The registry consists of 83 names, which those people were forced to make false confessions, and had cases that involved imaginary crimes (crimes that were later discovered to have never occurred) and deaths. More than 20% are Indigenous and are mostly Indigenous men. Canada's justice system does not treat Indigenous people fairly when it comes to imprisonment by putting them in harsh conditions that include prolonged solitary confinement, and even coercing them to plead guilty when they are innocent. To put it into perspective, one article I read claimed Indigenous incarceration to be the “new residential schools”.  

It is frustrating to know that to this day some people are still serving time for a crime they did not commit, because of racism in our criminal justice system. On top of that victims of wrongful convictions rarely receive compensation for the time they served. Both Canada and the US show systemic issues, but continuing work by psychologists, criminologists, researchers, lawyers, and advocates can help shine a light on this issue and move toward solutions and preventative policy. As criminology students, understanding this reality within the criminal legal/justice system is imperative to our comprehension of the criminal legal system and the long lasting effects of the injustices it creates.