The criminal justice system in America today is flawed by bribery, personal vendetta, political influence, racial factors and ulterior motives. The number of false incarcerations in the system has thankfully deteriorated due to the DNA analysis and fingerprinting. However, there are still countless people serving time for crimes they did not commit. What’s an even scarier thought is the fact that while innocent men rot in jail, the real criminals are still on the loose.

A study from 188 criminal justive attorneys, members of the police department, judges, public defenders and 41 state attorneys general found that around 10,000 people are faslely conviected of “serious” crimes every single year.

According to The Innocence Project, there have been 337 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S. so far. Exoneration, by definition, is the action of officially absolving someone from blame, in this case for a crime.

Statistically, the races of the exoneeres showcase that a little less than half are African-American. 70 percent of those exonerated by DNA testing are African-American.

There are an array of trends that indicated that these wrongfully convicted incidents are not isolated events, but rather a fault of our justice system. The most popular reason for false incarcination includes eyewitness misidentification testimony.

The human mind simply cannot rewind and play back the exact incidents of an event, no matter the weight in a person’s life. Memory can be easily contaminated, whether that be from police questioning that leans the interviewee towards a certain suspect or a massive lapse of time that impairs the subject’s thinking.

Witnesses, afterall, are only human. And humans get it wrong over and over again. It’s absurd to base an entire criminal trial off of a witness statement, especially as “witnesses” may have been sucked into corruption, bribery or just simply have false statements. Why rely on “he said, she said” when there is often scientific fact to prove the accused guilty or innocent.

The wish is for the forensic community to exist without misconduct, as with everything in our justice system, but the reality is that it simply does not.

According to The Innocence Project, while many in the scientific community are ethical and responsible, “forensic analysts make mistakes that could result from lack of training, poor support or insufficient resources to meet an ever-growing demand. But in some cases, forensic analysts have engaged in misconduct. For example, in some wrongful convictions later overturned with DNA testing, forensic analysts fabricated test results, reported results when no tests were conducted or concealed parts of test results that were favorable to defendants.”

But how can society suddenly change the corruption within a system that favors conviction? There’s a couple of answers.

Society can encourage the exonneration of the innocent and encourage falsely convicted criminals to file appeals. Laws should be implemented that improve the policies that prevent wrongful conviction and misconduct in the medical field. Regardless of the steps taken, the first move is to recognize this unlawful corruption.