On the Records: Texas Exonerations

The state of Texas comes in third behind Illnois and New York in the number of exonerations in the United States since 1989, according to data compiled by Mother Jones.

With the help of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and the Innocence Project, reporters Beth Schwartzapfel and Hannah Levintova built a state-by-state data set of exoneration data. The data includes the number of exonerations, the number of exonerations granted because of DNA testing, the number granted without DNA evidence and whether or not each state has a compensation law that pays the wrongfully convicted for time they spent imprisoned.

The data set (and the resulting map) is a companion piece to Mother Jones' January/February 2012 article that tells the story of when Gov. Rick Perry posthumously pardoned exonerated inmate Timothy Cole.

Signed into law in 2009, the Timothy Cole Act increased financial compensation for Texas exonerees from $50,000 to $80,000 for each year they were wrongfully imprisoned. In September, the Tribune visualized the more than $42 million that has been spent to compensate exonerees who spent more than 700 years behind bars. The Tribune also visualized the 238 executions that have taken place on Perry's watch.

We asked Mother Jones if we could borrow the data and look at it from the Texas perspective, and below we have created a map and built a table of each state's numbers.