National Registry of Exonerations

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the University of Michigan Law School, Michigan State University College of Law and the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society. The Registry was co-founded in 2012 with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law to provide detailed information about known exonerations in the United States since 1989. As of June 28, 2025, the Registry lists 3,698 known exonerations in the United States since 1989, 463 pre-1989, and 46 cases in a separate database, The Groups Registry, which contains cases involving mass vacations of convictions tied to the official misconduct of a government actor. The National Registry does not include more than 1,800 defendants cleared in 15 large-scale police scandals that came to light between 1989 and March 7, 2017, in which officers systematically framed innocent defendants.

The co-founders of the Registry are Rob Warden, then the executive director of Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Michigan Law professor Samuel R. Gross, who with Michael Shaffer wrote the report Exonerations in the United States, 1989–2012. According to Gross, "these cases merely point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about." The registry and report includes cases of defendants convicted of crimes that never occurred, cases involving false confessions, and cases involving innocent defendants who pleaded guilty. The new report reveals many more exonerations than previously found.

The National Registry of Exonerations is the largest and most detailed compilation of exoneration data ever made.