Americas...:Hundreds of US Inmates Sentenced to Death Are In...

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Hundreds of US Inmates Sentenced to Death Are Innocent: Study

Local Editor

As many as 300 people who were sentenced to death in the United States over a three-decade period were likely innocent, according to a study published in a leading science journal according to Reuters on Monday.

Dozens of defendants sentenced to death in recent years have been exonerated before their sentences could be carried out, but many more were probably falsely convicted in the US, according to Samuel Gross, the study's lead author and a professor at the University of Michigan.

"Our research adds the disturbing news that most innocent defendants who have been sentenced to death have not been exonerated," Gross wrote in the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In their research, Gross and his colleagues examined the 7,482 U.S. death sentence convictions between 1973 and 2004.

Of those, 117 had been exonerated in recent years, thanks to the efforts of numerous groups and a tide of public attention to issues surrounding the death penalty.

An estimate of approximately 4 percent of those sentenced to death were actually innocent, nearly three times the number exonerated during that period, according to Gross and his co-authors.

For their conclusion, the research group used a mathematical formula that included the number of inmates whose sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, the length of time it took for a convicted inmate on death row to be set free, and the number of inmates who were in the end exonerated.

Although the study focuses on a period ending 10 years ago, the percentage of false death sentence convictions likely holds true today, Gross said.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team