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Convicted of a Crime You Didn't Commit...because No Crime was Committed

The ABA Law Journal brings us this headline: Prisoner exonerations are at an all-time high, and it’s not because of DNA testing, which states "Of the 87 known exonerations in 2013, 27 were cases in which no crimes had taken place. Almost half of the no-crime exonerations were for nonviolent-crime charges, mostly drug convictions." Law professor Samuel Gross have created a National Registry of Exonerations. Professor Gross and his colleagues primarily find exoneration cases through news articles.

Curious to try your hand at finding cases with exonerated defendants by looking at newspaper articles? We have a number of resources here in the law library for electronic versions of newspapers. In our Accuracy Check Resource research guide, for example, we've listed a number of them. The research guide also includes a link to all of the newspaper databases to which OSU has subscribed. Factiva, Press DisplayLexisNexis, Westlaw, and BloombergLaw are also online sources you can search for free.