(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Fifty percent of wrongful convictions in the United States involved Black defendants, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which has logged more than 2,000 exonerations between 1989 and the present. 

The newly launched registry, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, puts into stark relief the problems plaguing the U.S. justice system. The listed crimes range from murder to rape to robbery. And, most often the false convictions stemmed from perjury or false accusation (51 percent), mistaken eyewitness identification (43 percent) and official misconduct by police officers and prosecutors (42 percent).

Police misconduct accounted for a large percentage of no-crime, group exonerations. At least 1,170 defendants were cleared in the aftermath of 13 major scandals around the country in which police officers fabricated crimes, usually by planting drugs or guns on innocent defendants.

Sometimes authorities—police, forensic experts and prosecutors—worked in collusion to send innocent persons to prison. One such example is Richard Miles, a Black man who was convicted in 1995 for murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Miles’ conviction was based on the murder and attempted murder of Deandre Shay Williams and Robert Ray Johnson Jr., respectively. The men were sitting in their car before a Texaco gas station on Northwest Highway in Dallas, Texas, just before 3 a.m. on May 16, 1994, when a Black man wearing dark shorts, a white tank top and a floppy hat walked up to the passenger window, reached in and shot them.

Marcus Thurman, who was waiting in line to purchase gas, said he heard the gunshots and saw the gunman running past, then later getting into a white Cadillac. Thurman followed the Cadillac while calling 9-1-1. Later, 19-year-old Miles was arrested, having fit the description of the assailant.

In August 1995 Miles was convicted based mainly of the testimony of Thurman, who identified him in court, and Vicki Hall, a trace evidence analyst with the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences, who testified that she found elevated levels of gunshot residue on the palm of Miles’ right hand.

Not taken into account were the alibis provided for Miles during the time of the shooting; five other witnesses who identified the shooter as a 6-foot-plus dark-skinned Black man –Miles was light-skinned and 5-foot-9-inches tall; and Miles’ own testimony that he was left-handed, had never shot a gun and that he handled matches—a source of chemicals that mimic gunshot residue—because he smoked.

In 2007, an inquiry by the New Jersey-based Centurion Ministries—which investigates wrongful convictions—revealed that authorities had withheld two vital police reports from Miles’ defense attorneys. One was an anonymous call from a woman who said her ex-boyfriend Keith Richard—a 6-foot-6-inch dark-skinned African American—had confessed to being the shooter.

Later a gunshot residue expert determined that prosecution expert Vicki Hall had exaggerated the significance of the tests on Miles and that the residue detected was not proof that he had fired a gun. She later agreed to change her previous testimony.

On Jan. 6, 2010, Thurman—the prosecution’s key witness—recanted his in-court identification of Miles, saying he had told prosecutors he could not identify Miles and they coached him on where Miles would be sitting so he could pick him out in front of the jury.

Then in October, the District Attorney’s office said they had identified the source of a previously unidentified fingerprint found on the victims’ car in a place consistent with that of someone leaning on the car while shooting inside.

With all the overwhelming evidence, not only was Miles freed, but on Feb. 15, 2012, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the lower court ruling freeing Miles and found him “actually innocent.”

For more information on the registry, click here.