The Registry was co-founded in 2012 with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law to provide detailed information about known exonerations in the United States since 1989.
[2][3] The co-founders of the Registry are Rob Warden, then the executive director of Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Michigan Law professor Samuel R. Gross, who with Michael Shaffer wrote the report Exonerations in the United States, 1989-2012.
,[2]Black and white people are exonerated at very similar extremely low rates when compared to their prison populations and convictions per race.
With a difference of .003% the difference between white and black exoneration rates was equal to 3 people out of 1,001,012 prisoners, showing little to no racial bias The registry also indicates whether a co-defendant or a person who might have been charged as a codefendant gave a confession that also implicated the exoneree and whether the false conviction case involved "shaken baby syndrome" or child sex abuse hysteria.
[6] In rape cases, the largest contributor is eyewitness misidentification, frequently by white victims who misidentify black defendants.
[6] Witness mistakes are also present in the majority of false convictions for robbery, which has few exonerations because DNA evidence is rarely available in such cases.
To which must be added most of the 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in "group exonerations".