In the early morning hours of June 30, 1995, a fire sparked to life in Kristine Bunch's mobile home. It fanned out across the floor and climbed up the walls, then formed an impassable barrier across the middle of the trailer. Bunch, 21, snapped awake in the living room. Her three-year-old son, Tony, shrieked for her on the other side of the flames. 
 
 Bunch staggered outside and howled for a neighbor. She bashed Tony's window with a tricycle. As the flames lashed 30 feet into the dawn sky, a fire engine tore up to the house. A firefighter, crawling on his belly, found Tony's charred body in the bedroom. 
 
 Bunch told police she had no idea what caused the fire. Soon, though, arson investigators determined that a liquid accelerant such as kerosene or lighter fluid had been poured in Tony's bedroom and the living room. Police arrested Bunch on charges of arson and felony murder. Eight months later, Bunch went on trial. By then, she was 22 and unexpectedly pregnant with a second child. The evidence against her seemed overwhelming. Two arson investigators gave compelling testimony for the prosecution, and the jury took only a few hours to convict her on both counts. 
 
 At sentencing, Bunch recalled, the judge sneered down at her belly. 
 
 "I understand that you have arranged to have yourself impregnated," he said. "You thought it would work to your advantage somehow in this process. It will not. You will not raise that child." 
 
 The judge gave her the maximum sentence: 60 years. 
 
 
 
 Karen Daniel and Judy Royal are obsessed with people like Bunch. 
 
 During their nearly 30 combined years at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School, the two lawyers have helped exonerate more than two dozen people once found guilty of horrendous crimes. Most of the people they have freed are men; just four are women. And for a long time, Daniel and Royal thought that disparity made perfect sense. Men are convicted of crimes, especially violent crimes, at much higher rates than are women. So it follows that most people exonerated of crimes are also men: The National Registry of Exonerations, a University of Michigan Law School database that has cataloged information on more than 1,600 exonerations nationwide since 1989, includes just 148 women. 
 
 About three years ago, however, Daniel and Royal began to question whether that number was too low. Women make up about 11 percent of the people convicted of violent crimes, but just 6 percent of those exonerated of violent crimes. At the urging of a former client, Julie Rea Harper—who spent four years in prison for the murder of her son before a serial killer confessed to the crime—Daniel and Royal decided to try to figure out if there was anything that set exonerated women apart. 
 
 They started by looking at the few women whose cases they had worked on themselves. "I haven't had any men's cases that looked like these four cases," Daniel recalls thinking. "Could that really be a coincidence?" 
 
 After three years of pursuing that question, Daniel and Royal have concluded that most innocence projects—including their own legal clinic—are failing to bring justice to wrongly convicted women. They have identified factors that make female clients more difficult to exonerate, and uncovered startling facts that distinguish the cases of wrongly convicted women from those of men. And they have launched a project that could change how the American innocence movement helps these women get justice. 
 
 
 
 Daniel and Royal started by digging deep into the exonerations database. Their first insight had to do with DNA evidence—the very breakthrough that launched the innocence movement a quarter century ago. "Women tend not to be convicted of the types of crimes that can be overturned based on the results of DNA testing," Daniel explained. Men perpetrate the overwhelming majority of rapes and murders of strangers. These crimes are much more likely to leave behind DNA evidence that can rule out an innocent suspect, or point to the real rapist or killer. 
 
 But when women kill, they usually kill someone close to them. And in most of those cases, DNA isn't relevant. When a woman is suspected of killing her husband or her child, investigators are likely to find her DNA all over the crime scene whether she's guilty or innocent—so DNA testing can do little to exonerate her. Sure enough, 27 percent of the men in the exonerations registry were freed using DNA evidence. The same was true of only 7.6 percent of the women. 
 
 Yet many exoneration projects, including the original Innocence Project founded in 1992, only work with convicts who can be absolved through DNA. Because courts consider DNA tests definitive and trustworthy, genetic evidence is often the most effective way to overturn a wrongful conviction. Innocence projects have tended to avoid cases in which the offender knew the victim, because it can be hard to disentangle what happened in a domestic crime. In some cases, Daniel said, "you almost have to look into that person's brain to know what happened." About half the women in the registry went to prison for harming someone in their care. 
 
 But reliance on DNA and aversion to domestic cases weren't the only hurdles for wrongly convicted women. In a whopping 63 percent of the women's cases, Daniel and Royal realized, it turned out that there was never a crime to begin with—the death was actually a suicide or an accident. That was true in only 21 percent of the men's cases. 
 
 This was a critical discovery. The tools innocence projects rely on are designed to solve crimes. When DNA evidence isn't available, innocence investigators may seek to establish alibis, interview witnesses overlooked by police, undermine mistaken witness identifications, or track down alternative suspects with a history of similar crimes. Attorneys have a much easier time getting a wrongful conviction reopened when they can point to the real culprit. 
 
 Yet if a woman is wrongly convicted for an accident that kills her child, there is no crime to solve, no "real killer," and probably no alibi. 
 
 Overturning convictions for crimes that were really accidents is difficult and time-consuming. Attorneys may have to prove that the prosecution misused or misunderstood forensic science or withheld crucial evidence. Proving that something was an accident may require attorneys to understand highly technical and controversial evidence on fire science, shaken-baby syndrome, toxicology, or rare medical conditions, and hire expensive expert witnesses to bolster their arguments. These hurdles disproportionately affect women: Daniel and Royal have found that 37 percent of the women (but around 20 percent of the men) in the exonerations registry were cleared because their original convictions used false or misleading forensic evidence. 
 
 There was one more thing that set exonerated women apart: Daniel and Royal have come to believe that, in many cases in which women were freed because no crime had been committed, sexist stereotypes had been used to conjure up a motive. 
 
 "Almost every case has something like this," Daniel told me, recounting one trial in which a prosecutor suggested a mother had killed her son so she could pursue a career in modeling. "That was based on one tiny conversation expressing slight interest in maybe having a nice photo taken," Daniel said. The woman spent years in prison before the real perpetrator came forward. 
 
 When Harper, the woman blamed after a serial killer murdered her son, was on trial, the prosecution portrayed her variously as thirsty for revenge on her ex-husband or, pointing out her pursuit of a postgraduate degree, career-obsessed with no time for a child. Her ex-husband testified that Harper considered an abortion when she first became pregnant (which Harper denied). "And that was used to show she was capable of murder," Royal said, noting that the trial—and jury selection—took place in a rural, heavily conservative county in Illinois. 
 
 In the case of Kristine Bunch, the prosecutor said he didn't think the blaze burned Bunch badly enough. Wouldn't a mother walk through fire to save her child? He offered evidence that Bunch was a bad mother, telling the jury in his closing argument that she had asked a friend to take custody of Tony, even though the friend had denied this rumor in her testimony. Not to mention the judge's comments about Bunch's pregnancy. 
 
 These sorts of narratives have "nothing to do with whether the evidence shows that a person did what they're being accused of," said Andrea Louise Lewis, an attorney who works for Royal and Daniel. "And these women get wrongfully convicted in these cases where nothing happened. Nothing criminal happened at all." 
 
 
 
 After Kristine Bunch gave birth to her second son, correctional officers put her in an ankle chain just long enough for her to reach the toilet in her hospital room. It had been three months since she went to prison. Bunch held her baby for a fleeting moment before her parents took him home with them. Then she made it her single-minded mission to find someone to help reopen her case. 
 
 "I realized, I'm going to have to fight," Bunch recalled. She sent out hundreds of letters and received hundreds of rejections. 
 
 Daniel and Royal have come to believe that in many cases sexist stereotypes had been used to conjure up a motive. 
 
 While Bunch despaired in prison, new research emerged showing that the signatures of an accidental fire are easy to confuse with signs of arson; as a result, many old arson cases have been called into question. In a similar vein, child abuse investigators once took it as gospel that a baby with brain swelling and certain forms of internal bleeding had been violently shaken within the past several hours. But a new body of evidence suggests that infections, infant strokes, and accidental falls can also cause the telltale symptoms of shaken-baby syndrome (SBS). Meanwhile, child abuse researchers now believe that a symptom like brain bleeding can take days—not hours—to cause serious problems. If a child has several caregivers—a babysitter, relatives, and immediate family members—it can be impossible to say with certainty who abused her. 
 
 But it's prosecutors who decide whether to file charges or fight appeals, and not all of them buy the new science. When I sent questions about wrongly convicted women to the National District Attorneys Association, I was referred to Josh Marquis, an NDAA board member and Oregon district attorney who is a strident skeptic of the innocence community. Daniel and Royal noted that a disproportionate number of women are exonerated because new science cast doubt on their original conviction—or even moved medical experts who once testified against them to change their minds. But Marquis said that he and many of his fellow prosecutors don't trust the developing science. New doubts about SBS, he said, are shared by only "a very small group of doctors" whose voices have been amplified by the defense bar. As for developments in arson science, he said, "arson investigation is more of an art than a science." 
 
 It was only when Bunch connected with an Indianapolis attorney named Hilary Bowe Ricks, and scraped together a modest fee using her $1.30-a-day prison earnings, that she learned that new arson science could cast her conviction into doubt. In 2006, Ricks convinced the Northwestern center to join the case, and the team, which by then included Daniel, soon found a bevy of problems with the conviction. Bunch's original defense attorney had argued that one of the trailer home's many electrical problems probably caused the fire. Any accelerant, he insisted, was likely from a kerosene heater the family sometimes ran in the living room. However, state investigators working on-site (using now-questionable science) observed burn patterns in Tony's bedroom that fire experts at the time saw as undisputed evidence of arson. And a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives chemist who examined 10 samples sent to his Washington, DC, lab testified at Bunch's original trial that the floor of both the living room and the bedroom tested positive for liquid accelerant. 
 
 Bunch's new legal team obtained the raw data that the ATF chemist had analyzed. According to lawsuits her attorneys have since filed against the investigators for withholding evidence, someone had altered the result for the sample in Tony's bedroom, which was negative for accelerant, making Bunch seem guilty. It appeared to Ricks as though investigators hadn't found accelerant anywhere in the trailer home, except in the living room, where the heater stood. 
 
 The fire that had taken Tony's life now looked like an accident. (The state investigators have denied any wrongdoing, and an ATF spokeswoman declined to comment.) 
 
 Bunch's legal team brought this undisclosed evidence to the Indiana Court of Appeals. On March 21, 2012, a three-judge panel reversed Bunch's conviction. The state Supreme Court affirmed the ruling in August, and she walked out of prison, a free woman for the first time in more than 16 years. By Christmas, prosecutors quietly declined to retry her. 
 
 "When you walk out, you're exonerated, and you're free and clear. But that hurt, that humiliation, that shame—it doesn't go away." 
 
 
 
 A few months after Bunch was released, Daniel and Royal launched Northwestern's Women's Project, an exoneration effort focused exclusively on freeing wrongly convicted women. They have already agreed to represent six women—cases that will involve child head trauma and arson science—and in December, they asked the Illinois Supreme Court to grant their first appeal. Meanwhile, their team is poring over files from dozens of suspicious convictions around the country and amassing court transcripts for an in-depth study of wrongful convictions of women accused of killing their children. 
 
 Daniel and Royal's tiny project may wind up in the vanguard of work to exonerate both men and women. More wrongful convictions are overturned each year, but fewer and fewer of them involve DNA: Paul Cates, a spokesman for the Innocence Project, told me that investigators have now cleared many "easy" DNA cases—such as convictions that can be overturned by testing a single previously untested rape kit. Instead, more cases now involve complex DNA evidence, or none at all, and many more of those cases are ultimately found to involve an accident. Last year, a record 125 people were exonerated across the country; in 58 of those cases, courts found no crime was committed at all. 
 
 Today, Kristine Bunch volunteers for the Women's Project, sorting through inmates' letters. She reads each one carefully, remembering the decade she spent writing pleas just like theirs. "You live with this freaky numbness," she said. "It's almost like you're underwater and everything is in slow motion. And you can't seem to pull yourself up out of it." 
 
 She is thrilled that there is now an outfit giving convictions like hers its full attention, run by attorneys who understand that everything about a woman—her career, her ambitions, how much she cries—is ripe for judgment. In her off-hours, she is trying to get to know her 19-year-old son. Even though she saw him nearly every weekend in prison, she missed out on raising him, and building a strong relationship has proved difficult. 
 
 So has the healing process. Many men who were wrongfully convicted didn't know their supposed victims. But with Bunch, the accident she was blamed for not only took 17 years of her life—it took her child. 
 
 "You're accused of this horrible, horrible crime, you're put away, you have newspapers saying horrible, horrible things about you," she said. "When you walk out, you're exonerated, and you're free and clear. But that hurt, that humiliation, that shame—it doesn't go away because you've been exonerated. It's hard to step back out and act like you're normal and part of the world." ||||| GREENSBURG, Ind. -- A mom who has been behind bars since 1996 accused of murdering her toddler son in an arson fire, walked free from jail Wednesday after new evidence was presented that led a court to grant her a new trial. 
 
 A sheriff led Kristine Bunch, wearing a new dress and black patent leather shoes and carrying her prison clothes in a Wal-Mart bag, out the door of the jail. He let go of her arm and then said quietly: "You're free." 
 
 Bunch, 38, turned down the sidewalk and went straight to her mother, Susan Hubbard. They had a long embrace. 
 
 Next in line for Bunch was her son, 16-year-old Trenton, who had never visited his mother outside of prison, who has never slept under the same roof with her except for his very first night. Bunch went back to the Indiana Women's Prison the day after giving birth at a local hospital. 
 
 Authorities say Bunch set fire to her mobile home in a blaze that killed her 3-year-old son, Tony. 
 
 Bunch, then 22, was sentenced to 60 years. But on Wednesday, at 38, she was released, pending a new trial that was granted in March by the Indiana Court of Appeals. 
 
 The Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law took up Bunch's case in 2007 and was joined in the cause by Chicago attorney Ron Safer, whose Schiff Hardin firm worked on the case at no cost. In 2009, they presented new evidence to the appeals court based, in part, on technological advances in fire investigations. 
 
 The new evidence, Safer said, made it impossible for the fire to have happened the way the state alleged, that some test results the state provided were simply incorrect. In actuality, tests showed that he died of carbon monoxide poisoning, Safer said. Had the fire been set with an accelerant in the manner prosecutors alleged, he would have died from burns. 
 
 On Wednesday, Senior Circuit Judge W. Michael Wilke, based on the fact that Bunch's family put up bond money for her in 1996, said the words she and her family had waited 16 years to hear: "The defendant will be released from the Department of Corrections." 
 
 Decatur County prosecutors were unavailable for comment. Bunch has a court appearance next week. But, Safer said, "Today she is a free woman, and we are determined to make sure that she has spent her last day behind bars." 
 
 Bunch said she was initially in a state of shock upon being sentenced to 60 years for arson and the murder of her son. She likened it to a bad dream that wouldn't end. Upon her release, Bunch was joyful but expressed no bitterness over a conviction she has always maintained was a mistake. 
 
 "I haven't been by myself," she said. "I had a family that stood by me. I had people that believed in me and stepped up. And you can't receive blessings like that and be bitter." 
 
 While in prison, Bunch said she took part in Kairos prison ministry and became a Catholic. She earned undergraduate degrees in English and anthropology from Ball State University. And now she has dreams of going to law school, focusing on criminal law and joining a wrongful conviction team. 
 
 "I want to give back. I've been very blessed," she said. "One day I want to fight for others because others fought for me." 
 
 First, Bunch said she wants to get reacquainted with her family. 
 
 Trenton already has a long list of things he wants to do with his mom. 
 
 He wants to take a trip to the zoo, go to a concert, have her watch him run track in the spring if he makes the team. 
 
 "I want to do the stuff that I should have been able to do a long time ago," he said, "and never got to do." 
 
 Initially, though, Trenton may have to help his mother navigate her 16-year time warp. When she was last free, cellphones were the size of shoeboxes, and she was amazed at the tiny devices her friends and her legal team were toting, that half the courtroom had to cough up at the judge's order before her hearing began. 
 
 And then there's the Internet -- she's heard about it but never seen it. There's no access in the prison. 
 
 "My son said I'm going to teach you how to Facebook," she said, "and we're going to look at the Internet." 
 
 But Bunch also relishes the idea of much simpler pleasures. She wants to watch her son sleep. 
 
 "I've never gotten to see my son sleep except for little naps when he would come visit me," she said. "I want to be able to bounce in his room all night and look at him while he's asleep." ||||| A mainland court has exonerated a young man executed for rape and murder nearly 20 years ago, but analysts cautioned that wrongful convictions would continue until the judicial system was thoroughly reformed. 
 
 The Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court said yesterday that Huugjilt, who was 18 when he was killed by firing squad in 1996, was innocent. 
 
 "We learned a heartbreaking lesson in this case; we are sorry," said Zhao Jianping, the court's deputy president. He presented 30,000 yuan (HK$37,960) to the parents as an expression of "sympathy", according to Xinhua. 
 
 Huugjilt's parents later visited his grave, where they burned a copy of the verdict "to tell him that the wrongful conviction has been redressed", the family said on its Weibo account. 
 
 His 62-year-old mother broke into tears in front of the grave. "I knew you were innocent, but I could not help you; I miss you so much," she said, according to video carried on the website of The Beijing News. 
 
 The court said it would set up a team to investigate the officials involved in the case. 
 
 The acquittal came three days after the Supreme People's Court ordered the Shandong Provincial Higher Court to review another controversial case. Nie Shubin was convicted of raping and murdering a woman in 1994 and was executed the following year. He was 21. 
 
 In 2005, a man arrested for a separate crime, Wang Shujin, confessed to the murder. The top court in Hebei , where Nie was executed, said it would review the case but there has been little progress in nine years. 
 
 The judicial system has been criticised as lacking independence, with government officials regularly steering court decisions, and prosecutors using "confessions" obtained through police torture. 
 
 Xu Xin, a law professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, had long pushed for reviews of the two cases. He said that without fundamental reform to improve judicial independence, "there will be more wrongful convictions even though some are being redressed". 
 
 He Weifang, a law professor at Peking University, said the two reviews were landmarks but little had been done to reform the judiciary. "There's no change to the problems in the system, such as inadequate judicial independence, government intervention, too much power in police hands, an unclear accountability mechanism and wide use of torture." 
 
 Huugjilt's case drew wide public interest after a series of media reports, later supported by legal experts, claiming the information presented to the court was flawed. Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the public sympathised with Huugjilt and Nie because they were executed at a young age. 
 
 Huugjilt was found guilty of raping and murdering the woman in a public toilet in Hohhot on April 9, 1996. He was sentenced to death and executed two months later. In 2005, an alleged serial rapist and killer, Zhao Zhihong, told police he had carried out the crime. But a retrial was held only in November. ||||| The five men whose convictions in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned have agreed to a settlement of about $40 million from New York City to resolve a bitterly fought civil rights lawsuit over their arrests and imprisonment in the sensational crime. 
 
 The agreement, reached between the city’s Law Department and the five plaintiffs, would bring to an end an extraordinary legal battle over a crime that came to symbolize a sense of lawlessness in New York, amid reports of “wilding” youths and a marauding “wolf pack” that set its sights on a 28-year-old investment banker who ran in the park many evenings after work. 
 
 The confidential deal, disclosed by a person who is not a party in the lawsuit but was told about the proposed settlement, must still be approved by the city comptroller and then by a federal judge. 
 
 The initial story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that a band of young people, part of a larger gang that rampaged through Central Park, had mercilessly beaten and sexually assaulted the jogger. The story quickly exploded into the public psyche, fanned by politicians and sensational news reports that served to inflame racial tensions. 
 
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 The five black and Hispanic men, ages 14 to 16 at the time of their arrests, claimed that incriminating statements they had given had been coerced by the authorities. The statements were ruled admissible, and the men were convicted in two separate trials in 1990. 
 
 In December 2002, an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, found DNA and other evidence that the woman had been raped and beaten not by the five teenagers but by another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer who had confessed to acting alone in the attack. Concluding that the new evidence could have changed the original verdict, Mr. Morgenthau’s office joined a defense motion asking that the convictions be vacated. 
 
 If approved, the settlement would fulfill a pledge by Mayor Bill de Blasio to meet a “moral obligation to right this injustice.” 
 
 The proposed settlement averages roughly $1 million for each year of imprisonment for the men. That amount would suggest that the city was poised to pay one of the men, Kharey Wise, who spent about 13 years in prison, more than it has in any wrongful conviction case. 
 
 The other four men — Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana Jr. — served about seven years in prison. 
 
 The lawsuit had accused the city’s police and prosecutors of false arrest, malicious prosecution and a racially motivated conspiracy to deprive the men of their civil rights, allegations which the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg denied and fought vigorously for more than a decade in federal court. 
 
 In contesting the suit, the Bloomberg administration argued that the authorities had acted in good faith and with cause, and should not be held liable. In 2011, a senior corporation counsel lawyer said that the charges had been supported by “abundant probable cause, including confessions that withstood intense scrutiny, in full and fair pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials.” 
 
 In early 2013, the city’s Law Department echoed those views. “The case is not about whether the teens were wrongly convicted,” a department spokeswoman said. “It’s about whether prosecutors and police deliberately engaged in misconduct.” 
 
 But in January, lawyers for Mayor de Blasio asked the court to delay the litigation so that the new corporation counsel, Zachary W. Carter, could “get up to speed on the facts and the circumstances” of the case. Later, the mayor said that Mr. Carter was “committed to making sure we get to that settlement quickly, some complicated issues, but we’re going to work through them very, very quickly.” 
 
 If the proposed settlement is approved by the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, it would then be submitted for approval to Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan. In 2007, Judge Batts rejected the city’s motion to dismiss the suit and allowed most of the claims to proceed. 
 
 In such settlements, the city typically does not admit liability or wrongdoing; and any settlement with the five men would presumably include the legal fees and costs. Aides to Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Carter and Mr. Stringer all declined to comment on Thursday when asked about the discussions, as did Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer representing four of the men. A lawyer for the fifth man did not return a message seeking comment. 
 
 The proposed deal comes not long after the city said it would settle two longstanding lawsuits involving the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices. In that litigation as well, Mr. de Blasio reversed the city’s long-held position, and he agreed to sweeping court-ordered reforms that the Bloomberg administration had tried to block on appeal. 
 
 The mayor made that announcement at a news conference in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where stop-and-frisk tactics had been widely used. He appeared with Mr. Carter; the police commissioner, William J. Bratton; and, in a show of unity, lawyers with groups that had sued the city. 
 
 It is not yet known if or how the mayor might announce a settlement of the Central Park lawsuit, if it is approved. 
 
 Over the years, the men have consistently maintained their innocence in the rape of the jogger, Trisha Meili, who was left with no memory of the attack. (Years later, Ms. Meili revealed her identity and wrote a book, “I Am the Central Park Jogger.”) In prison, three of the men — Mr. Richardson, Mr. Salaam and Mr. Santana — maintained their innocence in the rape at parole hearings, where such a stance hurt their chances at a reduced term. At the hearings, the men acknowledged being in the park as part of a group of teenagers, some of whom committed assaults unrelated to the attack on Ms. Meili, and most expressed regret for the events, without going into specifics, transcripts show. 
 
 Mr. Santana indicated in his hearing that the larger group was out to rob people. “I took part in with the beatings of that man,” he said of one victim, adding, “If I could go back in time and not do it again, you know, it would have been a whole different story.” 
 
 The men’s lawyers have long said that their clients committed no crimes in the park that night. 
 
 In recent years, the case remained in the public eye, largely through a documentary, “The Central Park Five,” made by the filmmakers Ken Burns; his daughter, Sarah Burns; and her husband, David McMahon. 
 
 As recently as last Friday, about 100 people gathered at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn to view the film and to hear a talk by one of the men, Mr. Salaam. He described the stigma of living with the brand of being a rapist. “It wasn’t a popular thing to be one of us,” he said. The film, he added, “really gave us our lives back.” 
 
 At one point, he addressed the lawsuit. “Mayor de Blasio has said that he will settle this case for us and there has been some positive motion,” Mr. Salaam said, adding, “We’ve been waiting for 25 years for justice.”
– Exonerating women who are wrongfully convicted of violent crimes is no easy task—just ask Kristine Bunch. She got 60 years for supposedly setting the fire that killed her 3-year-old son in 1995, and struggled to find anyone who could help, Mother Jones reports. Finally, lawyers at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school exposed a glaring hole (and possibly corruption) in the arson investigators' case. That evidence got Bunch released in 2012 after 16 years in prison, USA Today reported at the time. Then two lawyers from the Center, Karen Daniel and Judy Royal, began helping wrongfully convicted women based on a shocking statistic: Women constitute roughly 11% of violent-crime convictions but only 6% of overturned cases. But why are women's cases harder to overturn? Daniel and Royal give their reasons: Women are usually convicted of violent crimes against people close to them (like a husband or son) so DNA evidence won't help; the suspect's DNA is already spread around the crime scene. By contrast, men usually assault or kill strangers. An incredible 63% of women's exoneration cases turn out to be accidents or suicides rather than crimes. So instead of finding a "real culprit," Daniel and Royal may have to laboriously dismantle the prosecutors' case, perhaps with new science on arson or shaken-baby syndrome that not everyone accepts. Sexist stereotypes are used against women in court. In the case of a woman wrongfully convicted of murdering her son, the prosecutor implied she did it to pursue a modeling career. "That was based on one tiny conversation expressing slight interest in maybe having a nice photo taken," says Daniel. "Almost every case has something like this." Click for Mother Jones' full article.