The U.S. criminal legal system is a vast and complex machine, long subject
\nto public and scholarly scrutiny. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any
\nother nation, holding an astonishing 1.9 million individuals behind bars. Of
\nthem, approximately eighty percent are indigent, and over sixty percent are
\nracial minorities, despite these groups comprising a relatively small portion of
\nthe overall population. In this expansive system, which disproportionately tar
\ngets minorities and the poor, it is unsurprising that justice is not always served:
\nHuman error and bias are nearly guaranteed to occur at some juncture.
\nExperts estimate that about four percent of imprisoned individuals in America
\nare actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted, meaning
\nnearly 50,000 people are potentially being wrongfully held in state or federal
\nprisons today. Still, wrongful convictions based on actual innocence are only
\none piece of the puzzle. Many more individuals have been unjustly convicted
\ndue to violations of their constitutional rights. Class and race, however, are
\nnot the only common characteristics shared by those trapped in this derelict
\nsystem\u2014an alarming number of them were put there by misbehaving officials
\noccupying positions of power.
\nRecent data reveals that sixty percent of overturned criminal convictions in
\nthe United States were obtained as the result of official misconduct by govern
\nment actors, most frequently involving the concealment, falsification, or misrep
\nresentation of evidence by police and prosecutors. High-profile cases of
\nmisconduct have been widely reported in the media and analyzed by scholars.
\nAdvocates and policymakers have sought reform through litigation, legislation, and other means, but these efforts have largely fallen short of achieving change
\nfor a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because criminal justice stake
\nholders routinely disagree about the nature and extent of official misconduct,
\nwhat it derives from, and how often it occurs. As a result, relatively little pro
\ngress has been made over time to meaningfully examine some of the most perva
\nsive systemic injustices rooted in official malfeasance. But why is this? And
\nwhy, in an era of heightened public awareness about deficiencies in the criminal
\nlegal system and unprecedented access to information, has this issue not been
\nadequately addressed?
\nThis Article seeks to answer these questions by examining the role and scope
\nof known instances of official misconduct and evaluating the mechanisms by
\nwhich stakeholders have attempted to combat it. It scrutinizes the successes and
\nfailures of these efforts, highlighting how the lack of comprehensive data collec
\ntion has hindered reform. Specifically, this piece is the first to argue that the ab
\nsence of robust empirical data on official misconduct has impeded a thorough
\nunderstanding of its underlying causes and consequences, its frequency and vol
\nume, and the patterns that emerge within it. In advocating for the use of big
\ndata systems to uniformly track and analyze misconduct at the state and re
\ngional levels, the Article explores advancements that could be achieved if stake
\nholders prioritized systematic misconduct data collection. Finally, it proposes a
\ncollaborative framework for collecting, analyzing, and sharing misconduct
\ndata, offering practical guidance for implementing the necessary infrastructure.
\nBy fostering transparency, encouraging best practices, and holding officials
\naccountable, the use of big data systems to study official misconduct could dis
\nmantle systemic barriers to justice and revolutionize the system as we know it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n