The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2021 often combined with false accusation, false/misleading forensic evidence, ineffective representation and eyewitness misidentification.198 In Philadelphia, two men were exonerated, one largely due to a forced confession and the other involving misleading forensic evidence, both ultimately as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. After almost 23 years on death row in Mississippi, a man was exonerated also due to prosecutorial misconduct, unconstitutional removal of Black jurors and false evidence. Another man in Florida was exonerated after new forensic evidence proved his innocence. False testimony and misleading evidence had led to his wrongful conviction.199 Areas of concern Resumption of federal executions In July 2020, the United States administration resumed federal executions after a 17‑year hiatus. This resumption is unprecedented in terms of the number of executions, and represented more than half of the executions nationwide. During the reporting period, more people were executed at the federal level than in the last 57 years combined. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent in United States v. Dustin John Higgs, “to put that in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades.”200 This practice ran contrary to the nationwide trend of gradually moving away from the death penalty.201 The Death Penalty Information Center noted that Black people are disproportionately represented on federal death row. Thirty-four of the 57 people on federal death row in 2020 were people of colour, including 26 Black men.202 198 Death Penalty Information Center, op. cit., note 177, p., 12; The most recent data from the National Registry of Exonerations states that the most prevalent causes of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases are official misconduct and perjury or false accusation. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989 — cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. See here: The National Registry of Exonerations, % Exonerations By Contributing Factor. 199 Ibid., pp . 12–15. 200 United States v. Dustin John Higgs, 592 United States Supreme Court (2021). 201 Death Penalty Information Center, DPIC Analysis: Federal Execution Spree Out of Step with U.S. Death Penalty Trends and Attitudes, 3 September 2020. 202 Death Penalty Information Centre, Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty, 15 September 2020 and Death Penalty Information Centre, The Federal Government Restarts Federal Executions Amid Procedural Concerns and a Pandemic, 20 July 2020. 49