Wrongful conviction awareness now taught at all Illinois police academies

With Illinois being home to the top state in the country for wrongful convictions, the state agency that oversees police training has now signed off on a plan mandating Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance Training courses at all local police academies.

Approved by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, the first of its kind courses come as data shows wrongly convicted individuals have spent upwards of 21,000 years in U.S. prisons before being exonerated.

Illinois Innocence Project Awareness and Avoidance Director Marcus Beach said the changes have been a long time coming.

“The Illinois Innocence Project developed this program about seven years ago and has been teaching it at the Police Training Institute,” Beach told The Center Square. “I say kudos to them for deciding to make it mandatory at all of the academies.”

Beach said he spent 23 years as a police officer in Illinois and didn’t realize how big of an issue it is.

“This course teaches officers what the most common contributing factors to wrongful conviction are and how they can use best practices to avoid those things,” he said.

With Beach listing the Top 5 factors as false accusations and the use of incentivized testimony, official misconduct, eyewitness misidentification, issues with forensics and false confessions, Innocence Project staffers worked with state officials in developing the curriculum, which has been provided for the 3,100 cadets that have attended an academy class since March 2023.

Beach is now hoping to see the program expand, including having it offered to veteran officers.

“We've taught in all eight academies here that certify full time police officers and at each of those academies I've had veteran officers sit in on the class and they've all come up to me afterwards and told me what an impact it had on them and how they wished they would have had that training earlier,” he said. “We’ve talked about bringing it on a national level, but I'm also interested in bringing this out on the state level to the veteran officers.”

Beach said staffers also presented elements of the program at this year’s National Innocence Conference and have recently been in contact with other organizations across the country and internationally about implementing it.

“Wrongful conviction isn't just a United States problem,” he added. “It is unfortunately an issue across the world. I think that we're getting better because we now recognize that this is actually an issue and we're providing quality training and I think quality training is vital. We're collaborating with the police departments across the state at the foundation level to recruit police officers that are going to be representing our criminal justice system for the next 20 to 30 years.”

While Illinois tops the country for the most overturned wrongful convictions, the state is home to one of the lowest reimbursement programs at just $225,000, prompting a growing number of legislators to push to have that cap increased to $2 million.