21 states in the U.S. do not offer compensation for wrongful imprisonment. The Innocence Project works to exonerate people in the United States who have been wrongfully convicted of crime. It has estimated that 1 percent of all U.S. prisoners are innocent. With the number of incarcerated Americans being approximately 2.4 million, by that estimate as many as 20,000 people may be incarcerated as a result of wrongful conviction. Research into the issue of wrongful convictions have led to the use of methods to avoid wrongful convictions, such as double-blind eyewitness identification. Leading causes of wrongful convictions in the United States include snitches and unscientific forensics. Other causes include police and prosecutorial misconduct. African Americans make up 13.6% of the U.S. population, but 53% of exonerations, as of August 2022. See also Alford plea Error of impunity False accusations False allegation of child sexual abuse False confession Innocent prisoner's dilemma Legal abuse Perverting the course of justice Police misconduct Presumption of guilt Specific cases List of miscarriage of justice cases List of wrongful convictions in the United States List of exonerated death row inmates Notes and references Further reading Jed S. Rakoff, "Jailed by Bad Science", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 20 (19 December 2019), pp. 79–80, 85. According to Judge Rakoff (p. 85), "forensic techniques that in their origin were simply viewed as aids to police investigations have taken on an importance in the criminal justice system that they frequently cannot support. Their results are portrayed... as possessing a degree of validity and reliability that they simply do not have." Rakoff commends (p. 85) the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommendation to "creat[e] an independent National Institute of Forensic Science to do the basic testing and promulgate the basic standards that would make forensic science much more genuinely scientific." External links Justice Legal error Human rights Abuse of the legal system