David Quindt can't escape the 15 months he spent in Sacramento County jail for a murder he didn't commit. He moved all the way to Hawaii for a fresh start, yet he doesn't want to completely forget. Each semester, he tells his story to law school students to "open their eyes" about how criminal justice in America can go terribly wrong. Now, Quindt has his own little piece of the new National Registry of Exonerations, the most complete database of its kind ever, about 900 cases since 1989 – and counting.
These exonerations "point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about" because there are many more people who are falsely convicted but aren't able to exonerate themselves, say those who compiled the registry at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University law schools. The registry is a big deal to those who try to help wrongly convicted people, and rightly so. They say it documents that there are common problems that cause the vast majority of false convictions: mistaken identifications by eyewitnesses, unfounded accusations and misconduct by law enforcement.
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