Those limits grew out of lived experience and a deep Christian faith shaped by the Protestant Reformation. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments reflect that inheritance. They function as a kind of secular catechism, a rule book governing our system of justice.
This year, John Grisham stepped away from fiction to tell the stories of ten unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned Americans in Framed. His co-author, Jim McCloskey, is the executive director of Centurion Ministries, one of several Innocence Project partners nationwide. Their work is documented on their own websites and compiled by the University of Michigan Law School’s National Registry of Exonerations. The registry lists 297 exonerations in California since 1989, out of a nationwide total of 3,763 over the same period.
Why 1989? That was the year of the first DNA-based exoneration.
In a story that echoes Genesis, a twentieth-century Joseph appears in the person of Gary Dotson. Dotson was framed by an alleged victim who fabricated a rape claim to conceal a consensual sexual relationship and obtain birth control without her foster parents’ knowledge.
What followed was an astonishingly inept investigation. Police relied on a mug book identification, mismatched hair samples, and deeply flawed blood evidence analysis and yet, it was enough to secure Dotson’s conviction and a sentence of 20 to 50 years.
In Genesis, we never learn what became of Joseph’s false accuser, Zuleikha. In Dotson’s case, we do. His accuser experienced a religious epiphany and eventually recanted. After a lengthy and reluctant legal process, Dotson was released and later pardoned.
In California, the registry data averages just over eight exonerations per year from 1989 to 2025. That figure exists alongside a current prison population of roughly 95,500 and 261,400 felony arrests in 2024 alone. Since 1989 the California exonerations break down as follows: 120 homicides, 14 sexual assaults, 18 robberies, 34 drug cases, 40 child sexual abuse cases, and 71 classified as “other.”
How many innocent people remain incarcerated is an open question. What we do know is that the rate of exonerations is declining. Innocence Projects also tend not to publish how many applications they reject. Centurion Ministries has publicly acknowledged that in at least one case, follow-up DNA testing implicated a petitioner rather than exonerated him.
At the same time, a single corrupt officer, or a small group of them, can cause immense damage. Illinois provides a clear example.
Nearly 200 drug convictions in Chicago were overturned after investigators uncovered perjured testimony and tainted evidence linked to a team of officers led by Sergeant Ronald Watts. That scandal produced a noticeable spike in exonerations. Once those cases are removed from the data, the remaining trend is flatter and increasingly downward.
Several factors help explain this decline. DNA testing has resolved many older, pre-DNA cases. Courts have limited the use of forensic techniques once accepted as reliable but now exposed as junk science. Police procedures have improved, search and seizure laws are more strictly enforced, and technology has made evidence easier to document and verify.
Prosecutors evaluate this evidence with a legal duty to seek justice, choosing whether to charge or dismiss based on whether the standard of proof can be met. Defense attorneys then challenge government conduct through pretrial motions and, in the smaller number of cases that proceed, at trial.
There are few government processes subjected to more scrutiny.
Are eight exonerations per year too many? Yes. Even one is too many. But we live in an imperfect world, inhabited by Zuleikhas, Danglars, and Wattses. Close is not good enough.
Centurion Ministries and organizations like it exist to remind us of that.
