Over the years numerous cases have been reported, where wrongfully convicted criminals have been exonerated. Exonerated meaning, someone has been absolved from blame for a fault or wrongdoing. These individuals spent years some a lifetime in a prison cell for a crime they have never actually committed but yet were still put in jail. In extreme cases individuals are even sentenced to death. This issue has been around for decades and has been researched by numerous scientists. Hugo Bedeau and Michael Radelet published their studies in the Stanford Law Review claiming that 350 individuals have been wrongfully convicted in capital cases. Their work inspired many people to begin researching this issue.
The public plays a more important role in everyone’s everyday life then people think. Often there is a struggle for the exonerees to return back to a normal life. The things they experience while incarcerated change their lives forever and often people don’t understand that they are in fact innocent and never committed a crime.

The main causes of wrongful conviction include: eyewitness misidentification, improper forensic science, false confessions, and informant misconduct. Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of the wrongfully convicted. Research has shown that humans have difficulty recalling events that have happened, since the human brain is not videotape we cannot be certain about the details of an event that occurred. Jurors often rely more on what people say when their on the witness stand, then DNA evidence. In the case of Ronald Cotton, a young woman was raped and asked to look at six different photos. When she thought she has narrowed it down to two she said, “I think this is the guy.” This rest of this man’s life is at stake and he is put away because the girl “thinks” that it was him who committed the crime.
The next common cause of