Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

The U.S. criminal legal system is a vast and complex machine, long subject to public and scholarly scrutiny. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other nation, holding an astonishing 1.9 million individuals behind bars. Of them, approximately eighty percent are indigent, and over sixty percent are racial minorities, despite these groups comprising a relatively small portion of the overall population. In this expansive system, which disproportionately targets minorities and the poor, it is unsurprising that justice is not always served: Human error and bias are nearly guaranteed to occur at some juncture. Experts estimate that about four percent of imprisoned individuals in America are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted, meaning nearly 50,000 people are potentially being wrongfully held in state or federal prisons today. Still, wrongful convictions based on actual innocence are only one piece of the puzzle. Many more individuals have been unjustly convicted due to violations of their constitutional rights. Class and race, however, are not the only common characteristics shared by those trapped in this derelict system—an alarming number of them were put there by misbehaving officials occupying positions of power.

Recent data reveals that sixty percent of overturned criminal convictions in the United States were obtained as the result of official misconduct by government actors, most frequently involving the concealment, falsification, or misrepresentation of evidence by police and prosecutors. High-profile cases of misconduct have been widely reported in the media and analyzed by scholars. Advocates and policymakers have sought reform through litigation, legislation, and other means, but these efforts have largely fallen short of achieving change for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because criminal justice stake-holders routinely disagree about the nature and extent of official misconduct, what it derives from, and how often it occurs. As a result, relatively little progress has been made over time to meaningfully examine some of the most pervasive systemic injustices rooted in official malfeasance. But why is this? And why, in an era of heightened public awareness about deficiencies in the criminal legal system and unprecedented access to information, has this issue not been adequately addressed?

This Article seeks to answer these questions by examining the role and scope of known instances of official misconduct and evaluating the mechanisms by which stakeholders have attempted to combat it. It scrutinizes the successes and failures of these efforts, highlighting how the lack of comprehensive data collection has hindered reform. Specifically, this piece is the first to argue that the absence of robust empirical data on official misconduct has impeded a thorough understanding of its underlying causes and consequences, its frequency and volume, and the patterns that emerge within it. In advocating for the use of big data systems to uniformly track and analyze misconduct at the state and regional levels, the Article explores advancements that could be achieved if stake-holders prioritized systematic misconduct data collection. Finally, it proposes a collaborative framework for collecting, analyzing, and sharing misconduct data, offering practical guidance for implementing the necessary infrastructure.

By fostering transparency, encouraging best practices, and holding officials accountable, the use of big data systems to study official misconduct could dis-mantle systemic barriers to justice and revolutionize the system as we know it.

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