Derrick Hamilton turned 18 behind bars. A few months later in 1983, he was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder and robbery, and transferred to an upstate New York prison over 200 hundred miles away from his family.
This sequence of events happened not once, but twice, to the young father. He was paroled in 1989, but by 1992, he was again convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and sentenced to 25 years to life. He was exonerated decades later in 2015, but it didn’t change the devastating truth that he was wrongfully convicted under false pretenses.
“Throughout that whole process, I still got to try to figure out how I’m gonna get out of here, how I’m going to survive this day while at the same time, fight for my freedom,” Hamilton recalls as he describes being locked up. “I’m not just fighting for my freedom. I’m fighting for my life because at any moment I can wake up and somebody stabbed me to death, or some officer beat me in the head because he’s having a bad day or he’s upset. This is our reality.”
Today, Hamilton, 58, is a grandfather and deputy director at the Perlmutter Freedom Clinic at Cardozo School of Law, where he teaches law students about how to defend and advocate for clients who’ve been wrongfully convicted. He is also the legal director for Families and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted, a nonprofit organization.
Across the country, Hamilton, along with more than 1,800 Black people, mostly men, have proven that their convictions were reached erroneously. Throughout the past decade, there have been a flurry of headlines about an individual or individuals walking out of courthouses or prisons after being forced to waste in some cases more than half of their lives incarcerated for a crime they didn’t commit.
It’s not shocking that Black people are victimized the most by the criminal justice system, but these numbers could be the tip of the iceberg to how many wrongful convictions actually exist, experts told Capital B.
There are over 3,400 wrongful convictions recorded in the National Registry of Exonerations’ database going back to 1989. Innocent Black people are seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of a crime than white people, and they are also “over-represented to a greater or lesser extent among exonerations for all major crime categories listed in the” database, “except white collar crimes,” according to the organization’s 2022 report.
Since 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations has published a comprehensive database that over time has created enough information to establish and analyze what contributes to wrongful convictions.
What is a wrongful conviction?
The organization’s researchers found there are six contributing factors that stem from a broken system that has been utilized as a form of modern day slavery: official misconduct, perjury or false confession, mistaken identification, inadequate legal defense, and false or misleading forensic evidence. Additionally, DNA is considered a factor because testing evidence after a conviction can lead to an exoneration — less than 20% of cases to date — or possibly solving a cold case through familial DNA.
There are also individual actors involved in producing wrongful convictions.
“There’s that prosecutor who doesn’t turn over the evidence, or there’s the police officers who battered someone into a false confession. There’s the jailhouse snitch who’s getting money to tell, say that somebody did something,” Ngozi Ndulue, special adviser on race and wrongful conviction for the Innocence Project, said.
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The National Registry of Exonerations’ database’s intricate coding system reveals a variety of patterns and statistics that have assisted lawmakers to author criminal justice reform legislation. The database was co-founded by Sam Gross as a project through the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, University of Michigan Law School, and Michigan State University College of Law.
The small team of academics, journalists, and researchers created the database to put those climbing exoneration numbers into context, and published extensive reports to raise the public’s awareness.
“Data has power,” said Maurice Possley, senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. With data, “it is difficult to dismiss examples as being anecdotally cherry-picked to try to make your case.”
The database used the first post-conviction DNA case in 1989 as a starting point to document exonerations, and is consistently backlogging cases during that period, and back into the 1800s where nearly 500 wrongful convictions occurred.
Possley is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who has written over 2,500 of the 3,400, and rising, case summaries since the website launched in 2012.
“We don’t know how many wrongful convictions there really are. We only know the ones that we know that have turned into exonerations. And we are constantly finding cases that happened in the past that we didn’t know about,” he said.
In case you were wondering, yes, wrongful convictions also happen in federal court. But, they aren’t as prevalent as in state court. There have been 136 overturned convictions in federal court, where more than half of the exonerees are white, according to the database.
How do Hamilton’s cases explain cracks in the system?
In between enduring emotional, mental, and physical trauma that included bouts in solitary confinement, Hamilton earned his high school equivalency diploma. He also gained an informal legal education by reading books in the prison’s law library and connecting with other jailhouse lawyers.
Hamilton’s family was able to afford an attorney for his appeal. However, about 80% of people accused of a state crime cannot afford to pay for legal services, and in the appellate process, a convicted person’s constitutional right to a public defender is only extended for their first filing.
Hamilton’s conviction was overturned by the New York state Supreme Court Appellate Division’s 2nd Judicial Department, and a new trial was ordered in 1989.
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In the midst of the second trial, prosecutors presented Hamilton with the opportunity to end the case without admitting any guilt — an Alford plea. Hamilton accepted their offer by rationalizing his incarceration for an unrelated gun possession conviction, and not for a homicide he didn’t commit. It was also helpful to Hamilton that he didn’t have to admit any guilt in order to go back home to his family. Hamilton’s father was murdered a year before his release.
“There’s so much of your life that can crumble because of the fact that you are detained pretrial. And if somebody tells you you can get out right now by just pleading guilty to this,” it can be understood why someone would take that offer even if they are innocent, Ndulue said.
Because nearly all criminal cases don’t go to trial, and are resolved with either a guilty plea or dismissal, one cannot conclude that every person incarcerated is guilty.
Ndulue backed up that point with an example from 10 years ago out of Harris County, Texas. A crime lab tested a backlog of seized material that was believed to be drugs, including some evidence connected to cases where the accused person already pleaded guilty. It was found that most of the alleged drugs weren’t drugs at all. As a result, in 2016, 48 people were exonerated.
Because Hamilton took the Alford route, his case cannot be counted in the National Registry of Exonerations.
After Hamilton was released from prison, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to get a fresh start. Less than six months later, in 1991, Hamilton was a 23-years-old husband and father who was facing spending the rest of his life in prison for another murder that also happened in his old neighborhood.
While Hamilton was incarcerated, he hired a private investigator, and filed multiple unsuccessful appeals. Hamilton truly believed the criminal justice system would work in his favor like it did the first time.
Never did he imagine the process would take away 20 years of his life. By the time Hamilton was released from prison in 2011, he was able to connect with attorneys who agreed to take his case free of charge.
An appeal was filed.
In January 2014, the New York state Supreme Court Appellate Division’s 2nd Department made an unprecedented decision to overturn Hamilton’s conviction. In its decision, it lifted a legal barrier that systemically prevented petitioners from filing actual innocence claims if newly discovered evidence could clearly prove that a wrongful conviction occurred.
The legal precedent set in People v. Hamilton has been cited in at least 130 appellate petitions in courts around the country.
What efforts are aimed toward preventing wrongful convictions?
Broken down mathematically, and based on the total number of exonerees as of Feb. 5, it would mean that every month for 34 years, at least eight people were wrongly sent to prison for a crime they did not commit.
As Possley mentioned earlier, there is no way to account for how many wrongful convictions actually exist until each one is overturned after a hearing, new trial, or through a prosecutor office’s post-conviction review. Any of those options can take several years for one case to resolve.
By the end of 2011, the Brooklyn District Attorney Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, under the late District Attorney Charles Hynes, was launched, and Hamilton had been out of prison and on parole. Of the over 2,300 prosecutor offices in the country, only 101 have established a post-conviction review unit, according to a list compiled by the National Registry of Exonerations. Nearly half of those units have not overturned a conviction.
It took about two years for the CIU to review and exonerate David Ranta, who wrongly served 23 years for killing a rabbi. Following Ranta’s exonerations, Hynes, who was running for his sixth term in 2013, launched an investigation into dozens of cases, mostly homicides, that retired NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella was involved in. Scarcella retired in 1999.
Ranta’s case was significant as it was the first to publicly reveal that Scarcella, a decorated detective, used questionable police tactics just to close cases. Some of those tactics included coaching witnesses to pick out the wrong suspect in lineups.
Once Ranta’s exoneration made national headlines exposing Scarcella, many former and currently incarcerated people filed petitions to have their cases reviewed. By Primary Day, Hynes lost his reelection bid to the late Kenneth P. Thompson, the first Black person to lead that office.
Thompson revamped the CIU to become the Conviction Review Unit and included Hamilton’s case onto the pile of Scarcella-related cases to be reexamined. Scarcella was the arresting officer for Hamilton’s 1992 conviction for the murder of Nathaniel Cash.
“I hate to bring race into this, but it needs to be said. If he [Hynes] didn’t convict this white guy [Ranta], and the white community wasn’t so adamant in proving his [Ranta’s] innocence, then all of us brown and Black brothers who were convicted by this detective [Scarcella] would still be convicted,” Hamilton said.
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The work of post-conviction review units in prosecutor offices, legal nonprofit organizations such as the Innocence Project, and independent civil rights attorneys are slowly popping up across the country to investigate potential wrongful conviction cases. But those efforts are severely underfunded, says Rodney Bryant, president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.
“As we are reimagining what our criminal justice system looks like, we have to look at it in its totality,” and “we have to do a better job of investing in those types of advocacy groups. … because one falsely incarcerated person is just one too many,” Bryant says.
In 2015, Hamilton became one of 18 exonerees to date whose conviction was overturned because of Scarcella’s alleged tactics. Accusations against Scarcella have cost New York taxpayers $110 million in civil lawsuit settlements to 14 of the exonerees, the New York Times reported. Civil lawsuits are a form of recourse for exonerees in most states.
Bryant says there need to be more accountability for those whose deliberate actions resulted in a wrongful conviction. But the reality is, very few ever are.
In the interim, there needs to be more efforts on the front end to prevent people from being wrongfully charged, experts say. Some of the efforts include creating policies and practices around more DNA testing, using artificial intelligence as an assist to corroborate evidence before pursuing a suspect, and double-blind lineups where a nonpartisan officer conducts the procedure to prevent any possible influence on the witness.