Black People Are 7x More Likely To Be Found Guilty Of Murders They Didn't Commit

Ready for some news that isn't fake?

A study just found that, compared to their white counterparts, Black people are overwhelmingly more likely to be convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. (big surprise)

The research was performed jointly by the University of California, Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and the Michigan State University College of Law.

Now, to fully explain the findings, you’ve got to understand that all this is based on exoneration rates—meaning how often convictions get overturned later. This says nothing about how many innocent men and women of any race are still sitting behind bars because, obviously, that’s impossible to know.

What we do know is that Black people make up 13 percent of the United States’ population, yet they represent a full 47 percent of all exonerations. The takeaway is, African Americans are found guilty of crimes they didn’t commit way, way more often than whites.

When you break this down by types of crime, the numbers become even more astonishing. Take murder: Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than white people. While researchers say some of this can be attributed to the higher average homicide rate in the black community, it’s also true that an exonerated black person charged with murder is 22 percent more likely to have been the subject of police misconduct.

The racism gets more prevalent with sex crimes. Black people are later found innocent of this type of offense three and a half times more often than white people. In this case, researchers blame the false convictions on “own race bias” – where white victims misidentify their assailants due to not being as good at remembering faces of other ethnicities.

And then there’s the drug crimes. Innocent black people are found guilty twelve— yes, twelve—times more often than white people.

So the next time someone wants to argue about institutional racism, just send them this article.