exoneration

Exoneration is, in US law, the official process by which a person is formally cleared of criminal responsibility — typically after it has been established that the person was wrongfully convicted. The term has no single universal statutory definition in federal legislation, but it is used consistently in legal practice and scholarship to describe a situation in which a person's guilt has been disproved with the requisite legal certainty.

In the federal context, the most relevant statutory provision is 28 U.S.C. § 2513, which deals with wrongful conviction and imprisonment. To claim compensation under this provision, a person must either have had the conviction reversed or set aside on grounds of innocence, have been found not guilty at a new trial, or have received a pardon that expressly states innocence and wrongful conviction. The provision thus constitutes the primary federal basis for recognising and compensating victims of miscarriages of justice.

In practice, exoneration can be achieved by several routes: appeals that uncover procedural errors or new evidence, DNA analysis that disproves the original conviction, or witness statements that are retracted. Organisations such as The Innocence Project have played a central role in documenting and advancing exoneration cases in the United States, and The National Registry of Exonerations systematically records cases across all states.

Exoneration differs legally from a simple reversal of a conviction. A reversal may be due to procedural errors without any determination of the convicted person's actual innocence, whereas exoneration involves a positive finding that the person did not commit the crime in question. This distinction is particularly significant for access to compensation, since many states and the federal government require documented innocence — not merely a vacated conviction — as a condition for damages.

Compensation for exonerated persons varies considerably between individual states. Some states have enacted specific compensation statutes with fixed amounts per year wrongfully served, while other states have no general compensation scheme. At the federal level, 28 U.S.C. § 2513 allows a claim for damages against the government, provided that the statutory conditions are met.