It was a thinner-than-usual few days for breaking exoneration news, so today's roundup covers three concrete developments and then leans harder on the Registry and innocence-organization data that give them context.
1. Louisiana: 42 years in prison, and the state still won't pay
Elvis Brooks spent 42 years in Louisiana prisons before a court threw out his murder conviction. He is eligible for roughly $480,000 under Louisiana's compensation statute — and the state Attorney General's office is fighting it, according to reporting by Richard A. Webster for Verite News, republished by the Louisiana Illuminator on Aug. 6 (Louisiana Illuminator).
This is the part of wrongful conviction that almost never makes the evening news: getting out is not the end. The National Registry of Exonerations tracks this directly — as of its August 2026 compensation update, 38 states and the District of Columbia have wrongful-conviction compensation statutes on the books, but the Registry's whole reason for maintaining that page is that having a statute and actually getting paid are two very different things (National Registry of Exonerations, Compensation).
What you can do: Innocence Project New Orleans (ip-no.org) works Louisiana cases and tracks compensation fights statewide. If you live in Louisiana, your state legislators — not just the AG — control how narrow that statute's exclusions are.
2. Maryland: Baltimore officer indicted for allegedly inventing traffic stops
On Aug. 10, Baltimore State's Attorney Ivan Bates announced the indictment of Baltimore Police Officer Dequwan Houchins, who is accused of logging traffic stops that never happened in the department's electronic reporting system, allegedly to avoid responding to real calls (CBS Baltimore). A grand jury returned five counts of misconduct in office and four counts of falsifying a public record; he faces up to 12 years if convicted on all counts (Fox Baltimore). The case was brought by the State's Attorney's Public Trust & Police Integrity Unit (Baltimore City State's Attorney); Houchins has been with the department more than five years (The Baltimore Banner).
Why a wrongful-conviction outlet cares about paperwork fraud: falsified official records are the raw material of bad cases. An officer willing to write a stop that didn't happen is an officer whose reports, in any case he touched, are now impeachable — and defense lawyers across Baltimore should be running his name.
What you can do: Baltimore residents can file complaints about officer conduct through the city's Office of Equity and Civil Rights civilian review process (baltimorecity.gov), and tips about prosecutorial or police integrity issues go to the State's Attorney's office at stattorney.org.
3. New York: Queens judge ordered removed from the bench
The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct has ordered the removal of Queens Civil Court Judge Joseph Kasper, in a decision released in the first week of August (Queens Daily Eagle). The commission's decision centered on findings that Kasper kept practicing law after taking the bench and allowed a longtime friend with a criminal record to handle cases under his name (amNewYork).
Judicial discipline is one of the few accountability systems in the criminal legal system that is genuinely accessible to ordinary people: anyone can file. New York's commission publishes its determinations and complaint instructions at cjc.ny.gov. Most states have an equivalent body — Kentucky's, for example, explicitly notes it takes complaints from litigants, jurors, court staff, and prisoners (Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission).
The data underneath all three stories
- The National Registry of Exonerations' 2025 annual report recorded 97 exonerations for 2025 as of April 6, 2026 — the lowest annual total in any Registry report since 2013 (2025 Annual Report, PDF).
- Official misconduct — by police, prosecutors, or forensic analysts — was a factor in at least 70 of those 97 exonerations. Among homicide exonerations, it was worse: 40 of 51, or 78% (same report).
- That is not a one-year blip. The Registry's 2024 report found official misconduct in at least 104 of 147 exonerations, including 79% of homicide exonerations (2024 Annual Report, PDF).
- People exonerated in 2024 lost an average of 13.5 years each — roughly 1,980 years of life collectively in a single year's cohort (Michigan State University).
- Racial disparity is structural: 78% of 2024 exonerees were people of color, 60% Black (MSU, above). The Registry's earlier work found Black people made up 53% of exonerations while being about 13.6% of the population (University of Michigan Law).
- On death row specifically, at least 202 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated since 1973 — including Jermaine "Marlow" Wright, who was granted a Certificate of Innocence and expungement by a Delaware judge on July 23, 2026 (Death Penalty Information Center).
- The Innocence Project maintains its own running exoneration dataset drawn from case files, current as of April 2026, with the recurring contributing causes: eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, unvalidated or improper forensic science, informant testimony, and government misconduct (Innocence Project, Explore the Numbers).
Both the Registry and the Innocence Project also stress the role of "professional exonerators" — innocence organizations and prosecutors' conviction integrity units — in nearly every modern exoneration. There are now scores of CIUs and conviction review units nationally, and the Registry tracks them (NRE, Conviction Integrity Units).
The gap between review and relief
The Brooks story and the CIU data point at the same problem: a review unit or a court can conclude a conviction was rotten, and the person still waits — for a signature, for a check, for an office to act.
That is exactly where Richard Barge's case sits. New Jersey's Conviction Review Unit has already recommended his exoneration. The sole eyewitness recanted. The informants recanted. New evidence points elsewhere. The file now waits on the New Jersey Attorney General's Office.
Call (609) 292-4925, reference Richard Barge's case, mention Jennifer Davenport, and sign the petition here. A recommendation that nobody acts on is not justice — it's just a document.
Corrections and case tips: reply to this post. We update the roundup when the record changes.