In 2024, 147 people in the United States were exonerated after losing an average of 13.5 years of their lives to wrongful imprisonment, according to the just-released 2024 Annual Report of The National Registry of Exonerations. In total, the exonerated people lost 1,980 years of life to prison and the states that made the errors are liable for more than $4.6 billion in damages.
Factors leading to the exonerations include:
- Perjury or false accusations: 72%
- Official misconduct: 71%
- Inadequate legal defense: 33%
- False or misleading forensic evidence: 29%
- Mistaken witness identification: 26%
- False confessions: 15%
The report shows race continues to play a major role—78% of the exonerees were people of color and 60% of all exonerees were Black.
Exonerations by the state
There were 141 exonerations in 28 states and six from federal courts in 2024. Texas had the most exonerations with 26, followed by Illinois with 20, and New York and Pennsylvania with 15 each.
The 2024 report confirmed that, as in previous years, a few states accounted for more than half of the total exonerations. Also consistent with patterns over the last several years, a cluster of drug crime exonerations following the discovery of police corruption drove high numbers in the leading state.
For example, the 26 Texas exonerations include 17 cases tied to the misconduct of Gerald Goines, a former narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department. The last time Texas had the most exonerations in a single year was 2016—that capped a four-year period when nearly 200 defendants were cleared of drug possession convictions after the Harris County Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) discovered that people had pled guilty to drug possession before lab results showed the “drugs” were not actually controlled substances.
Illinois fell from the top spot for the first time in the last six years. Over the last several years, most Illinois exonerations were of drug cases involving disgraced police sergeant Ronald Watts. The discovery of Watts’s corruption has led to the exonerations of more than 200 people who had been falsely convicted of possessing drugs and weapons that Watts and fellow officers planted. In 2024, however, there was just one exoneration in a Watts case—the other 19 Illinois exonerations involved murder (17), manslaughter (1) and attempted murder (1). Seventeen of Illinois’s 20 exonerations were from Cook County (Chicago).
All 15 Pennsylvania exonerations were from Philadelphia, and eight of those cases involved post-conviction work by the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s CIU. In New York, nine of the 15 exonerations in 2024 were from the five boroughs of New York City.
The role of professional exonerators
The 2024 report shows CIUs and innocence organizations have participated in an increasingly larger share of exonerations over the years.
Last year, IOs took part in 53 exonerations, while CIUs helped secure 62. IOs and CIUs worked together on 22 exonerations in 2024—15% of the total. Overall, 93 (63%) of the exonerations in 2024 involved a professional exonerator.
“We cannot know how many of the exonerations involving professional exonerators would have happened even without their involvement, but these data suggest that the increase in the number of exonerations annually over the past 10 to 15 years is driven at least in some part by the proliferation of CIUs and Ios,” reads the report. “Whether that trend will continue is unclear, given the 2024 election of new head prosecutors in several of the largest prosecutorial districts with active CIU units, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.”
Long-term trends
As of March 1, 2025, the National Registry of Exonerations added 147 exonerations that occurred in 2024. That is about average over the last 10 years—except for 2022 when the agency added more than 250. In previous years, the peaks were driven by clusters of drug exonerations. The largest was in 2022 with 105 drug crime exonerations in a single year—99 of them in Cook County, Illinois.
Overall, the National Registry of Exonerations has recorded 3,646 exonerations in the U.S. from 1989 through 2024.
The registry is edited by Barbara O’Brien, professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law.