National Death Row Exoneration List Now 185 Innocent Men and Women.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Thursday, February 18, 2021
CONTACT: Mark Elliott, FADP Director, (727) 215-9646, mark@fadp.org

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the Death Penalty Information Center announced that it is adding 11 people to their “Innocence List.” The national total is now 185 exonerated death row survivors since 1973. See the DPIC announcement here.

Florida leads the nation with 30 wrongfully convicted people exonerated from death row since 1973, while 99 people were executed. That’s one innocent person freed from Florida’s Death Row for every three people executed. See FADP’s Florida Innocence List here.

Responding to the announcement of the addition of 11 more death row exonerees, Mark Elliott, director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, noted the role that racial bias plays in wrongful convictions,
“Three of every four wrongfully convicted people released from Florida’s Death Row are people of color, revealing a cruel inequality that is ingrained in Florida’s death penalty and overall criminal justice system.”

He continues, “No one knows how many more innocent people are now on Florida’s Death Row and no one will ever know how many have been executed. Whether one supports the death penalty or not, one innocent person on our death row is a wake-up call, thirty is a crash alarm. It is no wonder support for repeal of the death penalty is soaring here in Florida and across the country, in red and blue states alike. It is a wasteful, mistake-ridden, ineffective, and unnecessary big government program that fails every measure of justice.”

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Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) is a statewide nonpartisan grassroots organization working to end to the death penalty in Florida. Our network includes dozens of state groups and thousands of individual Floridians, including murder victims’ family members and other survivors of violent crime, law enforcement professionals, families of the incarcerated, and death row exonorees.