The Color of Guilt: A History of Wrongful Convictions and Racial Control

This paper examines the relationship between Jim Crow-era lynching and wrongful convictions in the modern United States by tracing how racialized presumptions of guilt persisted across changing legal forms. Using historical scholarship, legal cases, and contemporary wrongful-conviction data, and detailed case studies including the Scottsboro Boys, Curtis Flowers, and Anthony Ray Hinton, it argues that although extrajudicial mob violence declined during the twentieth century, many of its underlying assumptions were absorbed into formal legal institutions. The first part of the paper analyzes lynching as a form of racialized punishment sustained by accusation, public spectacle, and weak legal protection. It then examines the historical transition through which public mob violence declined while racialized punishment increasingly moved into courtrooms and imprisonment. The case studies illustrate how discriminatory jury selection, inadequate defense counsel, and barriers to post-conviction review continued to undermine the presumption of innocence for Black defendants. The paper concludes that wrongful convictions should be understood not only as isolated legal failures but also as part of a longer history in which racial injustice was reconfigured within the legal system rather than fully eliminated.