The Exonerated
by Mariela Patron
This contains the data visualizations of a larger project that profiles people who were wrongfully convicted in California and as a result, applied for state compensation. People who have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated are called 'exonerees.' Under SB 618, exonerees can apply for monetary compensation in California. Currently, if the
California Victim Compensation Board approves a person's application, applicants can receive $140 for every day they were in prison.
The data used comes from
The National Registry of Exonerations, which is a collaboration between the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. The registry includes names of people who have been exonerated across the nation and the details pertaining to each individual case. The registry listed 1,900 exonerees at the time the data was used in October 2016.
For the first graph, I compared the number of exonerees in California to the population of prisoners statewide.
I filtered the data to just see the exonerees from California. The prison population data is from the from the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
A large group of prisoners in California are Hispanic, but they are the smallest group to be exonerated when compared to white and black prisoners
After they are exonerated, those who were wrongfully imprisoned are not guaranteed monetary compensation. First, they have to submit an application to the California Victim Compensation Board.
Most of the exonerated prisoners in California do not apply for compensation
To analyze compensation for those accused of crimes related to homicide, I cross-referenced the names of exonerees from California in The National Registry of Exonerations with data from the California Victim Compensation Board. The Board's website has the names of people who were approved and denied compensation. As of October 2016, the board had denied compensation to 58 people and approved compensation to 25. If a person was neither approved nor denied compensation, they were assigned to the "No Application / Under Review" category. According to the California Victim Compensation Board, there are 16 applications under review as of December 2016.
How does California compare nationally?
Like I did before with the state, I compared the number of exonerees across the nation, to the population of prisoners. I used data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to find the national prison population.
Nationally, Hispanic prisoners are also being exonerated on a smaller scale
How long did the wrongfully convicted prisoners wait before being exonerated?
Again, I used The National Registry of Exoneration. I subtracted the year of conviction from the year of exoneration.
Nationally, black prisoners typically waited almost twice the amount of time as white prisoners before being exonerated
In California, black prisoners also typically spend longer in prison before being exonerated
