End Conviction Based On Confession

Too many times have innocent people in this country been thrown in jail based on a confession they were forced to or coerced into giving by the investigating party. If one person sits in a jail cell, and loses precious time out of their life because the investigators decided to pin a crime on anyone and not the guilty party, the entire system is in question. There is a reason why our great nation leads the world in incarceration rate (approx. 2,000,000 citizens)... Police induced false confessions are among the top causes of conviction, according to a study by Cornell University. The Huffington Post reported that in 2015, 20% of people who were exonerated were placed in prison for crimes they did not commit, based solely on false confessions. Which is a record number of 149 American citizens who fell victim to the traps in the American justice system. The number seems to be rising annually. On average, people exonerated serve 14.5 years of their life in prison. Since 1989, 31% of wrongful convictions included a false confession, according to the Innocence Project, however, the percent of wrongful homicide convictions based on false confessions is a staggering 63%. Of the roughly two million people in our jails, if only one percent were wrongly convicted, it would add up to twenty thousand people. To add to these statistics, 1 in 25 people on death row are more than likely innocent. If investigators and law enforcement actually put in effort to the arrest and capture the truly guilty, instead of pinning a crime on someone who fit the guilty description, our jails would not be over-populated, our citizen's trust in the police would be much better, and our quality of life would be much higher. We live in an era where detectives would rather have it seem like they caught the guilty party just to put a notch in their belt, rather than put in the extra time and effort to find true American justice. Under the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution, article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "Everyone charged with a penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he or she had had all guarantees necessary for a defense." In our nation, it seems that the innocent are labeled guilty, while the guilty remain free. My fellow Americans, please help me help the innocent.