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Politics & Government

New Database Recalls Godschalk Case

The National Registry of Exonerations documents more than 2,000 people who it says were wrongly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

It's been well documented that the United States imprisonment rate is the highest in the world, but a new database published Monday seeks to shed light on how frequently people sentenced to time in American prisons don't actually belong there.

The National Registry of Exonerations, created by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, contains what its creators call an up-to-date list of more than 890 exonerations in the United States since 1989.

More than 1,170 other people, not listed in the database, had their convictions overturned or otherwise dismissed following the discovery of what the project's initial report calls "major police scandals," including at least 339 people who were exonerated following a massive corruption case in the Philadelphia's police department's 39th district in  the mid-1990s.

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Pennsylvania's 27 exonerations in the database tie it with Massachusetts for ninth in the United States. The lone Montgomery County entry on the list is one that many local residents might recall: that of Bruce Godschalk, a Radnor landscaping worker who served 15 years in prison after being convicted for two rapes in King of Prussia in the late 1980s. One of the victims positively identified Godschalk.

Two independent DNA tests on semen samples taken after the rapes indicated that they were committed by the same man, but that man was not Godschalk. He was released from prison in February 2002 and later won more than $740,000 in a civil rights lawsuit against Montgomery County. Godschalk subsequently won an additional $1.6 million in a lawsuit against Upper Merion Township, whose detectives interrogated Godschalk and obtained a confession from him. Godschalk later said the confession was coerced. 

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As transformative as DNA testing has been to the criminal justice system, the National Registry of Exonerations says that it has been responsible for exonerating only 37 percent of the 873 people listed in its database. As a group, those 873 people have spent more than 10,000 years in prison.

The longest prison stint on the list also took place in Pennsylvania. Jerry Pacek was just 13 years old when he was convicted of murder in Brackenridge, a few miles north of Pittsburgh, in 1958. He was exonerated in 1991, at age 55.

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