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 tar
gets 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 govern
ment actors, most frequently involving the concealment, falsification, or misrep
resentation 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 pro
gress has been made over time to meaningfully examine some of the most perva
sive 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 collec
tion has hindered reform. Specifically, this piece is the first to argue that the ab
sence of robust empirical data on official misconduct has impeded a thorough
understanding of its underlying causes and consequences, its frequency and vol
ume, 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 re
gional 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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