Free at last!
Recent Cases

This sampling of recent cases demonstrates both the potential for injustice and the difference that individuals can make in preventing it.
Note:  We add links to updates with the original news articles reporting exonerations , so be sure to scroll down to check for "new news".

Timothy Cole died in prison of an asthma attack, at the age of 38. He proclaimed his innocence until his final days. But he left this world a convicted rapist.  Cole's loved ones never believed he kidnapped a fellow Texas Tech student from a church parking lot and raped her. They began to get confirmation a year ago, when they received a letter from Jerry Johnson, a man serving life in prison for two rape convictions, who said he was the rapist.   DNA  tests confirm it.  Now Timothy's family wants his name cleared.

Robert Gonzales of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a mentally retarded man who falsely confessed to the slaying of an 11-year-old girl in 2005 has been released from jail after a national database matched DNA in the case to another man in custody for another crime.  His attorneys had long argued for his release, saying none of the more than 60 scientific tests of items seized as evidence connected him to the victim. 

DNA testing, two confessions and a polygraph test all show that Patrick Leondos Waller did not commit the robbery, kidnapping and rape for which he was blamed more than 15 years ago, Dallas county prosecutors and defense attorney Gary Udashen agree.   Patrick has been exonerated and released from prison, the 18th Dallas County, Texas convict cleared by DNA.  But one of the victims refuses to believe Patrick is innocent.  That's how deeply witnesses can come to believe their own faulty identifications.

In 1989, prosecutors in Prince Edward Island, Canada wedged Anthony Hanemaayer between a rock and a hard place, convincing that despite his innocence, he needed to plead guilty to a rape he did not commit in order to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.  He took the deal, spent 2 years in prison, and has endured the stigma of a rapist since then.  And when notorious rapist/killer Paul Bernardo confessed to police and prosecutors in 2006 that he, not Anthony, had committed the crime, they didn't bother to tell Anthony.  If defense counsel in another case hadn't stumbled on it, Anthony still wouldn't know.

Raymond, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, spent four months in jail based on information that turned out to be false.  In charging documents related to a burglary from earlier in 2008, county police Detective Tate, wrote in an application for arrest warrant that Raymond H. Jonassen's fingerprints matched a set discovered at the crime scene.  In fact, there was no match, and the county crime lab never indicated a match.  It took another two weeks to dismiss the charge against Raymond.  Neither the county police nor the chief prosecutor see a problem in what happened.

A 54-year-old upstate New York man serving a murder sentence will get a new trial after DNA testing cast doubt on his 13-year-old conviction.  Sammy Swift was sentenced in 1995 to 20 years to life in state prison for the murder of Stephen DeLuca, who died five months after being beaten and left unconscious in his Auburn home during a robbery in April 1994. 

Imagine this scenario: Your employer gives you a laptop computer that is a ticking time bomb full of child porn, and then you get fired, and then you get prosecuted as some kind of freak.  That's what happened to Massachusetts state employee Michael Fiola.  Now defense and prosecution computer experts agree that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye.

Since Fiola's employer, the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA), provided him with the infected laptop in the first place, you'd expect an apology and an offer of reinstatement, right?  Wrong!  The DIA stands by the wrongs it has committed against Fiola.

DNA tests have exonerated Dean Cage, a South Side Chicago man who has served nearly 14 years in prison in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl who was attacked in the fall of 1994 as she walked to school.  Dean, who is now 41, was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 40 years in prison despite his assertions that he was innocent and was home at the time of the attack. 

Madison County, Mississippi officials have dropped murder charges against Hattie Douglas in connection with the death of her son Kadarrius.  Initial test results showed that Douglas' son had an alcohol level of 0.4 percent when he died May 11, 2006. But an independent pathologist's report said tests came back with conflicting results. The independent pathologist ruled the child died of pneumonia.  A doctor prescribed an iron supplement for Kadarrius, which contained a small percentage of alcohol.

In 1995, Alan Beaman of Normal, IL was convicted of murdering his former girlfriend, Jennifer Lockmiller, in 1993.  The prosecutor, James Souk, didn't tell the jury about evidence that showed Alan was 140 miles away when Jennifer died, or that forensic evidence linked another man, not Alan, to the murder scene.  Thirteen years later, the Illinois Supreme Court has reversed Alan's conviction, calling the evidence against him "tenuous."  James Souk was rewarded for his misconduct in the usual way -- he's a judge now.  The current county prosecutor, Bill Yoder, says he is "saddened for the family of Jennifer Lockmiller."  Apparently Mr. Yoder thinks it is okay to let a killer go free, so long as somebody does the time.

UPDATE - June 26, 2008 - Alan has been released on bond.  County prosecutor Bill Yoder says he'll retry Alan, and that he’ll present evidence against Beaman and “argue the case like they did the first time this case was tried.”

After almost 26 years in prison, Walter Swift of Detroit, MI has been officially cleared of raping a pregnant mother who was surprised in her Indian Village home as she played with her infant child.  In a joint motion both the Innocence Project and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office asked Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Vera Massey Jones to set aside Swift’s conviction -- one based on what authorities now concede was a shaky identification.

For the past seven years, a photo of Guy Randolph has been posted at Boston, MA police stations, labeling him the most dangerous type of sex offender. Neighbors who knew of his criminal record and the 10 years he spent in prison insulted him when they saw him on the streets. Police ordered him away from schools and playgrounds if he walked too close.  But on May 1, 2008, in a hearing that took less than 10 minutes, a Suffolk Superior Court judge said the wrong man had been convicted. More than 17 years after he was first arrested in the sexual assault on a 6-year-old girl, Randolph was exonerated of all charges and declared innocent.

After nearly 15 years in prison, most of which were spent on death row, Levon Junior "Bo" Jones of Kenansville, NC is now a free man -- and saying he is innocent of the crime that put him there.  His release comes as states ramp up executions in the wake the U.S. Supreme Court decision approving lethal injection.

After serving 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, James Lee Woodward of Dallas, Texas has been exonerated by DNA and freed from prison.  James maintained his innocence throughout his time in prison. But seven letters to police and prosecutors, six writs with appeals courts and two requests for DNA testing went nowhere. Eventually, he was labeled an abuser of the system.  Without the DNA review program authorized by Dallas DA Craig Watkins and coordinated by the Cardozo Innocence Project, James would never have been released.

A judge has dismissed charges against Cynthia, who was convicted of killing her Marine husband with arsenic, after new tests showed no traces of poison.  Prosecutors who were preparing for a second trial found that previously untested samples of Marine Sgt. Todd Sommer's tissue showed no arsenic.  A recently retained government expert speculated that the earlier samples were contaminated, prosecutors wrote in a motion filed in San Diego Superior Court. The expert said he found the initial results "very puzzling" and "physiologically improbable."

What were you doing in May of 1985?  That's when Thomas McGowan of Dallas, Texas was misidentified by a rape victim as her assailant.  He was sentenced to life in prison.  On April 16, 2008, after being excluded as the rapist by DNA -- 23 years later -- Thomas' freedom was restored.  He is the 17th Dallas man to be exonerated by DNA since 2001. 

The Innocence Project at Cooley Law School in Lansing has secured a new hearing for Nathaniel Hatchett, who was convicted in 1998 in Macomb County Circuit Court on charges of kidnapping, criminal sexual conduct and carjacking.  One of the main issues raised by the project's law students was why the court and defense were never notified of additional DNA samples that were taken from the victim's husband as part of the investigation.  DNA samples taken from the victim did not match Hatchett, either, but the prosecutor led the judge to believe that the DNA samples were from the victim's husband.

UPDATE:  On April 14, 2008, the Macomb County prosecutor's office dismissed all charges against Nathaniel.  He left the courtroom a free man, in the arms of his family.

The bologna and cheese sandwich that Glen Chapman savored on April 2, 2008 could have been his last meal.  Instead, it was his first as a free man after almost 14 years on death row.  Chapman, 40, was released from Central Prison on Wednesday after Catawba County, North Carolina District Attorney James Gaither Jr. dismissed murder charges against him.

Related:  A day after Glen Edward Chapman was freed from prison, the State Bureau of Investigation agreed to review allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice against Dennis Rhoney. The former Hickory police detective led the 1992 double-murder investigation that resulted in Chapman's convictions.  Ex-Cop Who Led Discredited Case Probed

A Los Angeles judge on March 10, 2008 overturned the conviction of a man who has spent the last quarter-century in prison for a murder he insists he did not commit, concluding that the prosecution's star witness lied.  The ruling comes after the witness recently recanted his testimony and could lead to freedom for Willie Earl Green, a former chauffeur who was sentenced to 33 years to life in a 1983 execution-style slaying at a South Los Angeles crack house.  Los Angeles County prosecutors must decide whether to appeal the decision, retry Green or free him. Considering the judge's conclusion that the star witness was unreliable, prosecutors would probably have a difficult task if they chose to retry the case.

For 14 years, Lynn DeJac of Buffalo, NY has steadfastly denied that she killed her 13-year-old daughter, Crystallynn Girard.  All along, she has accused her estranged boyfriend, Dennis Donohue, of strangling her child when Lynn was out for the evening.  A jury didn't believe her.  A judge called her accusation against Donohue a "red herring."    Now -- finally -- Donohue has been charged with one murder and is under investigation for two others.  One of those uncharged murders is that of Crystallynn Girard.

UPDATE: 11/9/07 - New trial opposed by DA Clark.

UPDATE:  11/17/07 - Police investigators say DeJac could not have murdered her daughter.

UPDATE:  11/28/07 - DeJac's conviction reversed; DA Clark vows to re-try her.

Note:  In 1994, the prosecution gave Dennis Donohue complete immunity from prosecution for Crystallynn's murder in exchange for his testimony against Lynn DeJac.  If Donohue killed the child -- and DNA evidence strongly supports that he did -- thanks to the state, he will never be held accountable for what he did to Crystallynn.

UPDATE:  2/13/08 - Prosecution autopsy review claims Crystallynn died of cocaine overdose.   While this new finding means Lynn DeJac will not be retried, it raises troubling questions about the competence of the medical examiner and the state's motivation to "slip out the back door" regarding Dennis Donohue's immunity.

UPDATES:  2/29/08 -  Exonerated mother says killer is still free.  All charges against Lynn DeJac have been dropped.  But on her first full day of freedom since being cleared by DNA evidence of the 1993 murder of her daughter, Lynn DeJac said that she can’t be at peace until the real killer is brought to justice and a new autopsy finding that the girl died of an overdose is reversed.

2/29/08 - Honored detective suspended without pay, charged with defying orders.  Detective Dennis A. Delano, an outspoken member of the Buffalo Police Cold Case Squad, faces departmental charges and has been suspended without pay.  The 28-year department veteran has publicly asserted he does not believe DeJac killed her 13-year-old daughter, Crystallynn Girard, in 1993.  Delano also has criticized the Erie County District Attorney's Office for accepting new forensic findings that indicate Crystallynn died of a cocaine overdose and not strangulation.

Kennedy Brewer of Macon, Mississippi, a mildly retarded, Black defendant, was convicted of raping and killing a 3-year-old girl and sentenced to death in 1992.  In 2002, he was cleared by DNA, but he wasn't released.  He has spent the past 5 years in the local jail, awaiting retrial.  Because you can bet, the local authorities plan to get another conviction and another death sentence.  The Sheriff says he can't look for a DNA match because Mississippi doesn't have a DNA database -- which is news to the state's crime lab director.  The prosecutor will bring back his star witness, dentist Dr. Michael West, whose bite mark testimony has been disproven by DNA in other cases, and who resigned from professional forensic dentistry groups to avoid expulsion.  Prosecutors are so sure they're right about Kennedy's guilt that they're willing to bet his life on it.

UPDATE:  2/9/08 - Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, both convicted of killing 3-year-old girls in Noxubee County, Mississippi, and both cleared by DNA, are slated to be released.  What did it take to reach this point?  Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood had to take the prosecutions of these murders away from the Noxubee County DA, something almost unheard of in the state's history.  The Attorney General has charged Albert Johnson with the murders of both children.

The case that Rachel Jernigan robbed a Gilbert, AZ bank was based on eyewitness identification.  After she was arrested, the robberies continued. Before she was tried, FBI agents knew Rachel bore a striking resemblance to Juanita Rodriguez-Gallegos, who was arrested for a string of bank robberies in Gilbert and surrounding communities.  Did they notify either the prosecution or Rachel's defense attorneys?  Of course not.  Rachel served 7 years of a 14-year prison sentence for Rodriguez-Gallegos' crimes before the federal government admitted its error.


David Scott, 39, of Terre Haute, IN, had been serving a 50-year prison sentence for the 1984 murder of Loretta Keith, who was bludgeoned to death in her bed with a hydraulic jack. Authorities said that DNA testing not available in 1984 — including analysis of blood found on a nylon stocking at Keith’s home — cleared Scott.  Prosecutors said the DNA test results showed that Kevin Mark Weeks, 44, of LaGrange, Ky., was the person who killed Keith.

“This all happened so fast,” said Vigo County Prosecutor Terry Modesitt, who filed a joint petition with Scott for his release.  Not really.  Four months after Scott was convicted, Scott's public defender, Larry Wagner, presented evidence from Weeks' accomplice that Weeks killed Ms. Keith, and that Scott had nothing to do with it.  The Indiana courts, all the way up to and including the state supreme court, rejected the evidence, but the PD Investigator Always Knew Scott was Innocent.


Somewhere between the spot Peggy Hettrick was abducted and the Fort Collins, Colorado field where her partially clad body was dumped, her killer would have shed pieces of himself, mothlike. As he pulled her through the grass that dark morning on Feb. 11, 1987, his skin cells could have sloughed off onto her black coat. A strand of his hair could have hooked onto her shoes. A sneeze could have dampened her blouse. This is the law of forensic science: When two people come into contact, they leave cells on each other. But in the Hettrick murder case, authorities strayed from this law by losing some of these biological relics and destroying evidence linked to a prominent doctor they never investigated for the crime. In doing so, they may have covered the killer's genetic tracks.  This happened in Fort Collins, where a detective clung to his belief that a 15-year-old boy committed the crime, despite no physical evidence. In a county where prosecutors opposed saving DNA, let alone testing it. In a state where the law doesn't create a duty to preserve forensic evidence.  The result:  An innocent man, Tim Masters, goes to prison for life, and the real killer moves on.

UPDATE:  January 3, 2008:  Innocence Bid Gets Boost.  Fort Collins, CO authorities violated evidence-discovery rules when they withheld expert opinions that conflicted with their theory that a 15-year-old Tim Masters murdered Peggy Hettrick in 1987, according to special prosecutors.

UPDATE:  January 22, 2008:  Tim Masters released and his conviction vacated.  DNA excludes Masters and points to another suspect.

Rickey Johnson of Leesville, LA spent 25 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.  His 2007 Christmas gift was being excluded by DNA, leading to his release.  How will he cope with a strange new world?  "I'll just take one day at a time. That's the way I learned it in prison; one day at a time. Wherever the Lord leads me, that's where I'll be."


Three times during his nearly 27 years in prison, Charles Chatman went before a parole board and refused to tell them what they wanted to hear: that he had raped a woman in his Dallas, TX neighborhood.  Chatman always maintained his innocence, and on January 3, 2008 a judge affirmed it. Chatman, 47, won his freedom after new DNA testing excluded him as the rapist, adding to Dallas County's nationally unmatched number of wrongfully convicted inmates.


Marty Tankleff
In 1988, Arlene Tankleff was slashed across the throat and bludgeoned to death, and her husband, Seymour, was mortally wounded in the middle of the night in their affluent Long Island home. Their son, Martin, 17, confessed, then recanted. But in 1990 he was convicted of their murders in a highly publicized trial that was featured on Court TV.  Ever since, he and the other surviving relatives have insisted that he did not kill his parents. Seymour Tankleff's brother, Norman, said that he never doubted the son's innocence. Mrs. Tankleff's sister, Marcella Falbee, said, "From the beginning, none of us ever believed he did this." Now Martin Tankleff's supporters claim to have new evidence, obtained by a former New York City homicide detective, that they say points to the real culprits.  Pushing to Clear His Name



If you are not familiar with Kenny's case -- one of the most compelling cases of innocence we have seen -- please read the following:
Complete transcript of Frontline Scotland's Killing Time profile of Kenny Richey's case.


John White confesses he's no angel.  But the Meriwether County, GA man always said he was innocent in the 1979 rape of a 74-year-old Manchester woman.  White, who was convicted of the rape and sentenced to life in prison, was released from the Macon State Prison in Oglethorpe, GA on December 10, 2007 after new DNA tests ruled him out as the rapist.


Two weeks after his release from prison in March 1991, Marcus Lyons arrived at the DuPage County Courthouse carrying a wooden cross.  As police tried to intervene, Lyons stepped onto a small platform attached to the bottom of the 8- by 6-foot crucifix, lifted a hammer and drove a nail into his foot.  It was a cry for help. Lyons had just served 3 years in prison for a rape he said he didn't commit.  "I needed someone to listen," he said in a recent interview.  A few years ago, someone finally did. A new attorney took his case, and in September, 2007, after DNA evidence from the 1987 crime proved his innocence, Lyons' conviction was dismissed by DuPage County State's Atty. Joseph Birkett -- the same prosecutor who tried the case.


A Durham, NC judge on October 8, 2007 dismissed murder and robbery charges first filed in 1993 against a mentally retarded defendant, ordering his release from a state hospital after 14 years in custody without a trial.  Floyd Brown, a 43-year-old Anson County man with an IQ of 50, was charged in the robbery and beating death of 80-year-old Katherine Lynch in 1993. He was found at the time to be incompetent to stand trial, and has remained in state custody at Dorothea Dix Hospital ever since as prosecutors refused to drop the case against him.


Few people listened when Ronald Gene Taylor declared himself innocent of a rape charge 14 years ago. But the Harris County District Attorney's Office finally agreed with him on October 3, 2007, acknowledging that the scandal-plagued Houston Police Department crime lab was responsible for sending yet another wrong person to prison.  The crime lab said there was no semen on a sheet taken from the rape scene.  New tests yielded the DNA profile of another man, a sex offender currently in prison, who looks very much like Taylor.


A slight cold drizzle fell from a colorless sky in St. Paul, MN. But after a decade behind bars, Sherman Townsend was ready to take any sky as long as he was free to walk beneath it.  "Oh, man!" exclaimed Townsend, tears in his eyes as he walked out of the Hennepin County jail a free man . Less than an hour before, a judge had commuted his 20-year sentence on a burglary conviction to the 10 years he'd already served.  He has maintained his innocence all along, and in a court hearing last week, another man - who'd been a key prosecution witness against Townsend - now said that he, not Townsend, committed the crime.


The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has overturned a 2001 solicitation for prostitution conviction that sent a Lutheran minister, Richard Kittilstad of Eau Claire, to jail after finding that key evidence - a taped conversation - had been altered by the alleged victims, male Panamanian students who wanted to stay in the United States.  Two different audio experts were able to see mechanical signs on the tape -- which purportedly recorded one conversation -- that five different tape recorders were used, and it had been dubbed, erased and spliced.


In 1982, a rape victim riveted a Dallas, Texas jury with her identification of Steven Phillips as her attacker.  She spoke at length about his "striking blue eyes."  So did the victims in 8 other sex crimes.  Phillips' eyes are green.  But when the jury convicted him anyway, Phillips pled guilty to the other crimes, which involved fondling.  Now Phillips is the first to benefit from Dallas DA Craig Watkins' joint initiative with the Cardozo Innocence Project, to identify and free the innocent.


Charles T. "Ted" Dubbs was convicted of sexually assaulting two women in Dauphin County, PA in 2000 and 2001.  Both women identified him as their attacker.  Wilbur Cyrus Brown, II has been convicted of a series of similar attacks, and has confessed to the two attacks Dubbs was convicted of committing.  Did the eyes deceive?
Charles Dubbs in 1999
Dubbs in 1999
 composite sketch
Composite Sketch
 Wilbur Cyrus Brown, II in 2001
Brown in 2001
UPDATE:  On 9/11/07, Judge David Ashworth dropped all charges against Ted Dubbs after prosecutors admitted the crimes he was convicted of committing were perpetrated by Wilbur Brown.  Dubbs'  Conviction  Thrown  Out.

COMMENTARY: Sometimes justice happens in spite of the justice system.  Sometimes it only happens when the people in the justice system get their noses rubbed in their messes.  On 9/11/07, Lancaster County District Attorney Donald R. Totaro did the right thing by freeing Charles T. "Ted" Dubbs from a 12- to 40-year prison term in two sexual attacks he probably did not commit. Dubbs was sentenced in May 2002.  Wilbur Cyrus Brown, a serial rapist who confessed to 13 other rapes, including one on the same jogging trail where Dubbs supposedly committed his crimes, confessed to those attacks in November.  But Totaro had to spin things to portray his office as a well-oiled machine that immediately turned to fix an honest error when it came to their attention. That’s not what happened.


In 2005, Claude McCollum was convicted of the rape and murder of Lansing (Michigan) Community College Prof. Carolyn Kronenberg in her classroom.  The conviction was based on what police termed a "confession" -- speculation whether McCollum could have committed the crime while sleepwalking -- and despite his exclusion by DNA.  Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III has reopened the case; he has been urged to test the same DNA that excluded McCollum against that of serial killer Matthew Macon.  Macon is linked to 5 recent murders similar to Prof. Kronenberg's, and another that occurred in 2004.

Now that evidence points to serial rapist/killer Matthew Macon as the man who brutally raped and murdered Lansing (Michigan) Community College Prof. Carolyn Kronenberg, experts are taking a careful look at what police and prosecutors called Claude McCollum's "confession" to that murder.  "It's shocking to me that this was enough to charge, and ultimately convict somebody," said Prof. Steve Drizin, one of the false confession experts who reviewed transcripts of the two-hour interview.  Read it for yourself.  Keep in mind that McCollum was excluded by DNA, and the state still called him a killer.  McCollum Police Interview Questioned.

UPDATE:  9/22/07 - Ingham County DA Stuart Dunnings, III has joined Claude McCollum's lawyer in asking the Michigan Court of Appeals to grant Claude a new trial.  According to the joint motion, Lansing Community College Police turned over a videotape which apparently showed that Claude was somewhere else on campus at the time of Carolyn Kronenburg's murder.  Dunnings said if he knew in 2005 what he knows now, he would still prosecute Claude.  Why wasn't the videotape turned over before trial?

UPDATE:  9/24/07 - The Michigan Court of Appeals has granted Claude McCollum a new trial.

UPDATE:  10/16/07 - Claude McCollum released on bail.  State says he poses no danger to public.  Translation:  He's innocent.

UPDATE:  10/24/07 - Charges against McCollum dismissed

A defense lawyer was found ineffective because he failed to inquire into the effects of blood loss and heavy sedation on the memory of a robbery victim who identified a defendant 11 days after the crime, a federal appeals court has ruled.  The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the conviction of Derrick Bell, who is serving 12 1/2 to 25 years in prison for the robbery and shooting of Brentonol Moriah in Brooklyn in 1996.  Moriah, who suffered enormous blood loss from a single shot to the thigh, spent the next 11 days under heavy sedation and in a near-comatose state. He did not name Bell as his assailant at the scene of the crime, instead giving only a general description of "male black, wearing a lemon-colored shirt," even though he knew Bell from having shared space with him in a rooming house for more than a year.

Dwayne Allen Dail of Goldsboro, NC always said he was innocent. He always said he was not the man who raped a 12-year-old girl in September 1987.  He turned down a plea deal that would have put him on probation for 3 years because he knew he was innocent, and he refused to plead guilty to something he did not do.  But a jury believed the victim's eyewitness identification, tenuous and inconsistent as it was, and junk microscopic hair comparison testimony.  Now DNA has undone Dail's conviction, proving he was right all along--he is innocent, and now he is free.

UPDATE: 10/11/07 - NC Gov. Mike Easley has signed a pardon of innocence for Dwayne, clearing the way for him to receive compensation for the 18 years he spent in prison.

In the fall of 1995, a man wearing a nylon stocking over his face broke into the Yakima, Washington home of a young mother.  He taped a mask to the woman's face and raped her while her child screamed in the background.  Ted Bradford was convicted of the rape and served a 9-year sentence, but always said he was innocent.   DNA from the tape used on the mask excluded him and an appeals court has vacated his conviction.  Yakima deputy prosecutor Kevin Eilmes plans to retry Bradford.


Jeffrey Dake of Deerbrook, WI, who served nearly 10 years in prison for raping a teenage girl before a judge freed him because he didn't get a fair trial will not be tried again.  Dake was convicted of the sexual assault in 1997, a year after a 14-year-old girl told investigators that Dake, a friend of her family who stayed in her home occasionally, came home intoxicated and twice had sexual intercourse with her over a two-week period.  What the jury didn't know was that the girl's father had been charged with assaulting her two months before Dake's trial.

In December 2000, Henry Miller was at his sister's rural Louisiana home recovering from a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, barely able to speak and unfit for long travel.  Until recently, Utah prosecutors were convinced that despite the stroke, Miller had journeyed to Salt Lake City, where he stole a woman's purse at knifepoint in a convenience store parking lot. Miller spent 4 1/2 years behind bars before he was freed because of newly gathered evidence that supported his alibi.

Dan Lackey of Wampsville, NY spent 3 years in prison for a rape that may never have happened in the first place.  The strongest evidence against him was an unrecorded confession police claimed Lackey made.  But this was not a DNA exoneration.  Rather, Judge Biagio DiStefano vacated Lackey's conviction because his accuser's credibility came into question.  Just three months after Lackey was convicted, she filed a false claim of rape, was convicted of false reporting and did jail time herself.

After 22 years behind bars for horrific crimes he didn't commit, Byron Halsey of Plainfield, NJ walked out of jail on the fast track to freedom.  Halsey, 46, faced the death penalty after being convicted in 1988 of murdering Tyrone and Tina Urquhart, the children of his girlfriend, with whom he lived at a Plainfield rooming house.  The convictions were vacated after an advanced DNA test showed that a neighbor was responsible for the crimes.

July 9, 2007 - Byron Halsey will not be retried.  All charges against him have been dismissed.

A judge in Oklahoma City has dismissed murder charges against Curtis McCarty, who was sentenced to death three times in the 1982 slaying of a teenager -- convictions that were based largely on testimony from a police department chemist who was fired for fraud and misconduct in 2001.  Curtis was prosecuted by Oklahoma County DA Robert H. Macy, who sent 73 people to death row, more than any other prosecutor in the U.S.  Macy has publicly said that he believes executing an innocent person is a sacrifice worth making in order to keep the death penalty in the United States.

In 1998, Gilbert Amezquita was convicted of severely beating a woman whose family owned the Houston, TX plumbing company where he worked.  But in November 2006, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals suggested that the true attacker was Gilbert Guerrero and ordered that Amezquita be retried or set free.  In February 2007, Amezquita learned he would not be retried.  And in May 2007 comes more good news: the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has recommended he be granted a pardon on the basis of actual innocence.

We have followed their cases for years (see below).  Now both are finally free.

Bob Gondor and Randy Resh
Lawyers say the case against Bob and Randy could be titled The Insider's Guide to Prosecutorial Misconduct.

In April 2005, an Indianapolis, Indiana judge exonerated Harold Buntin of robbery and rape charges based on DNA test results, but the rest of the justice system didn't find out about the decision for two more years. Court officials found that a bailiff or clerk failed to properly enter and distribute the order clearing Buntin.  Instead, the order was sent to storage.  He spent an extra two years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. 

In 1981, Jerry Miller was pulled off the street in Chicago, IL and picked out of a line up by a rape victim.  At trial, Miller was convicted of rape, robbery, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated battery.  In 2007, he became the 200th person to be exonerated by DNA.  That same DNA matched the DNA of an offender in the FBI's Codis DNA database, which became operational in 1998.  That means the real criminal not only got away with the 1981 rape, but that he committed at least one more crime that put him into the Codis database.

The trend of prosecuting non-criminal conduct has spread from New York, where former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani initiated it, to the heartland.  In Wisconsin, Georgia Thompson was a civil service employee when she was convicted of fraud, after being accused of steering a state travel contract to a firm whose top officials were major campaign contributors to Gov. Doyle. Never mind that she knew nothing about the campaign contributions and was just trying to save the state money.  In a stunning and extremely rare move, a 3-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals acquitted Thompson at the conclusion of oral arguments on April 5, 2007, and ordered her immediate release from prison.

Not a politically motivated prosecution?  Not a thinly veiled attempt by U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic to wound a sitting (Democrat) governor in the heat of an election?  If not, then why was Thompson repeatedly offered deals, even after she was convicted, if she would "talk about higher-ups."  Of course it was.  And an innocent woman was Caught in a Political Squeeze Play.

Anthony Capozzi of Buffalo, NY, an innocent man who has been in prison for almost 22 years after being wrongly convicted of two Delaware Park rapes, was exonerated March 29, 2007 by DNA evidence — evidence that had been stored in a cabinet at Erie County Medical Center for as long as he has been behind bars.  Capozzi, who resembled Altemio Sanchez, identified through the same DNA testing as the perpetrator of the attacks, had been convicted based on the testimony of the rape victims, who had picked him out of police lineups.

Analysis: The Wrongful Conviction of Anthony Capozzi: The Hindsight of DNA Technology by William J. Morgan, Jr.

Antonio Beaver was convicted in 1997 in the carjacking of a woman near the St. Louis, MO Arch the year before. The robber, wielding a screwdriver, was stabbed during a struggle with the victim.  Blood inside her car was not Beaver's, according to recent DNA test results. Prosecutors said the sample had not been tested before trial because it was too small for the technology of the day.  Beaver's ordeal began when the carjacking victim described a man with a baseball cap and gap in his front teeth. Six days later, a St. Louis police officer noticed Beaver on the street and thought he fit the description. Beaver voluntarily participated in a line-up.  The victim picked him from among four men.

The Dallas County, TX district attorney's office has acknowledged that prosecutors illegally withheld evidence that might have saved a man from a 1983 rape conviction and 10 years in prison.  Newly discovered evidence amassed by attorneys for James Curtis Giles "strongly suggests" that he was misidentified as one of three men involved in the gang rape, prosecutors said.  They said his conviction should be overturned, but stopped short of declaring Mr. Giles innocent. Instead, they asked state District Judge Robert Francis for additional time to investigate Mr. Giles' claim that a man with a nearly identical name was the true rapist.

The case began on the evening of July 21, 1994. Police officers all over Queens, NY were looking for four Latino men suspected of snatching three cases of Tahitian black pearls from vendors returning to their hotel in Elmhurst from a gem show in Manhattan. The vendors estimated the jewels’ value at $1.5 million.  As they escaped, the thieves rushed at a man in his driveway, demanding his car. The man was an off-duty police officer, and he managed to shoot his service weapon, a 9-millimeter Glock, before he was knocked unconscious. He told detectives later that he thought he had hit a robber who was grabbing at the barrel of the gun. That same night, Napoleon Cardenas accidentally shot himself in the hand .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he had been showing to two visitors.  Witnesses who couldn't pick Napoleon out of a line up immediately after the incident decided they could identify him after days and even years had passed.  After 7 years in prison, Cardenas was able to prove his innocence with the bullet fragments in his hand -- from a .380-caliber pistol, not a 9-millimeter Glock.

Following a "trend" begun by former US Attorney (now a presidential hopeful) Rudy Giuliani, criminalizing non-criminal conduct, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Michael J. Garcia went after David Finnerty and 14 other NY Stock Exchange floor specialists for "interpositioning."  Interpositioning means that instead of matching pending buy and sell orders, the specialists repeatedly trade for their company's proprietary account, making a profit from the slight differences in pricing.  The government said Finnerty cheated customers out of $4.5 million.  Judge Denny Chin overturned a jury's guilty verdict, however, concluding that no one was defrauded of any money and that interpositioning is not a crime.

David Gladden
12/11/05:  A mentally retarded man is convicted of murder. A serial killer lived next door to the victim. Testimony is suspect. After a decade in prison, Pete Shellem of the Harrisburg, PA Patriot-News asked:


4/7/06:  Patriot-News' Gladden series leads witness to come forward with important evidence he thought the police did not need.

2/17/07:  David Gladden was freed from a life in prison after authorities agreed evidence uncovered by a series of Patriot-News stories raised doubts about his guilt in the slaying of a woman.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan -- who presided over Timothy Atkins' murder trial 23 years ago -- overturned his conviction Thursday and ordered the Venice, CA man released immediately. Atkins, who is now 40, was still a teenager when he was convicted of killing Vincente Gonzalez on New Year's Day 1985.  The California Innocence Project, a law clinic at California Western School of Law in San Diego that seeks the release of the wrongfully convicted, was instrumental in securing his release after a key witness recanted her testimony that he confessed to the murder.

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley has pardoned a Sanford man who spent more than five years in prison for a 1998 armed robbery in Goldsboro.  There was no physical evidence against Steve Snipes, only testimony that the masked robber of the convenience store sounded like Snipes trying to disguise his voice.  Snipes presented alibis and a witness who testified that a man named Terrance Wyatt was the robber. Wyatt was caught committing an identical robbery while Snipes was in prison.

DNA evidence has cleared an Atlanta, GA man who has served 21 years in prison after being convicted of raping and kidnapping a woman at a Sandy Springs apartment complex in 1985, the man's lawyers said on January 19, 2007.   Willie O. "Pete" Williams, who is now 44, was convicted largely on the eyewitness testimony of the rape victim and of another woman who was assaulted — though not raped — a few days later in the parking lot of another Roswell Road complex.

A 50-year-old Dallas man whose conviction of raping a boy in 1982 cost him nearly half his life in prison and on parole won a court ruling on January 17, 2007 declaring him innocent. He said he was not angry, “because the Lord has given me so much.”  The parolee, James Waller, was exonerated by DNA testing, the 12th person since 2001 whose conviction in Dallas County has been overturned long after the fact as a result of genetic evidence, lawyers said.

Over the years, it simply became known as "the Cumberland case."The cold-blooded murders of Michel Giroux and his pregnant common-law wife, Manon Bourdeau, in their Cumberland, Ontario (Canada), home on Jan. 16, 1990, ignited two of the longest criminal trials in Canadian history. Four men -- Richard Trudel, James Sauve, Robert Stewart and Richard Mallory -- were convicted of the slayings in two separate trials.  the charges against Trudel and Sauve were stayed.  Superior Court Justice Colin McKinnon said the case had been "ravaged over time" and the 16 years of delays -- due to adjournments, lack of proper disclosure, lost evidence and witnesses lying under oath -- called into question the integrity of the justice system.

 The convictions of the remaining defendants in "the Cumberland case," Robert Stewart and Richard Mallory, have also been reversed.

UPDATE:  None of "the Cumberland case" defendants will be retried.  The Crown cites the age of the case and refuses to concede the innocence of the defendants. 

Visit Robert Stewart's website detailing the case at kangaroojustice.com.

Twenty-three times Matthew Fields told the Louisville detective interrogating him that he had nothing to do with an October 2005 break-in and sexual assault of a woman in her Parkridge Parkway home. But the detective told the 18-year-old that police could prove he did it. Midway through his two-hour interrogation, Fields told the police what they were waiting to hear -- he did it, although much of the information he gave them about the crime was wrong. For the next year, Fields sat in jail, awaiting trial.  But on January 10, 2007, prosecutors asked a Jefferson County judge to dismiss the case, because DNA tests on semen found at the woman's home didn't belong to Fields.

We may be jumping the gun, since a final decision must await further DNA tests on the remains of the real killer, but it appears that the persistence of Roy Brown of Auburn, NY will at last turn the key to his prison cell.  Jailed for a murder he did not commit, Brown unearthed statements withheld from the defense that implicated another man, Barry Bench, as the killer.  And DNA backs him up.

UPDATE:  Defense lawyers for Roy Brown on January 22, 2007 revealed that in a conference call earlier today, District Attorney Jim Vargason agreed to join the motion to vacate Brown's conviction for the 1991 murder of social worker Sabina Kulakowski.

In light of DNA evidence, a Duval County, Florida judge has thrown out the guilty verdict against Chad Heins, who was convicted 10 years ago for the 1994 murder of his 20-year-old pregnant sister-in-law in Mayport.  State Attorney Harry Shorstein, who previously said the DNA evidence was not sufficient to overturn the verdict, said he has not decided whether to retry Heins.  Barry Scheck, director of the Innocence Project, the New York-based legal group that took Heins' case, met with Shorstein. Scheck said Shorstein is a "thoughtful, responsible prosecutor" and he's "hopeful" that Heins can be set free.

UPDATE:  11/20/07 - Almost a year since his conviction was reversed and a new trial granted, lawyers for Chad Heins said that new state tests linking unidentified semen from his slain sister-in-law's bed to DNA from her fingernails cast further doubt on his guilt in the 1994 Mayport murder.   The retrial had been scheduled for Dec. 3 but was postponed indefinitely on 11/19/07 by Circuit Judge L. Page Haddock.  Another BIG step toward freedom.

UPDATE:  12/4/07 - Dec. 4, 2007 - Chad Heins has been released from jail after DA Shorstein drops murder and attempted sexual battery charges against him.  A Free Man After 13 Years.

Matt Livers of Murdoch, Nebraska, the latest false confessor to a murder, was set free after evidence that two other persons committed the crime surfaced.  The State's own expert agreed with the findings of the defense expert that Livers was mentally retarded, vulnerable to the tactics used by the police, and the confession was almost certainly false.  Still to be explained are findings in the car police said Matt drove the night of the murders.  Interestingly, no DNA is found in the car on first inspection. It is only on second inspection, using a wet swab, that the DNA is found, in the only area searched.

Marlon Pendleton of Chicago, Illinois says, "I always knew I was innocent," although the woman who picked him out of a line up was certain he was her assailant.  His repeated requests for DNA testing went unheeded while he served the first 10 years of his 100 year sentence for rape.  U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow heard his plea and ordered DNA testing.  The results absolutely exclude Marlon as the rapist.  The victim, however, remains convinced that she picked the right man. 

In April 1981, a Dallas woman was attacked and raped in her bedroom. When police showed her photographs of potential suspects two days later, she did not identify Fuller.  Several days later, police showed her a second group of photos. The photograph of Fuller was the only one that appeared in both arrays. Although the victim said her attacker did not have facial hair, and Fuller was pictured with a full beard, she identified him and he was arrested.  Twenty-five years later, Fuller has been exonerated by DNA.

Nine years after he was convicted of rape and burglary and 11 years after his arrest, DNA tests have cleared Allen Coco's name and record.  The 38-year-old Louisiana man had insisted since his arrest in 1995 that he was innocent. The 28-year-old victim had chosen his picture from a photo lineup.

If not for a chance inventory of DNA samples gathering dust in a Connecticut warehouse, Scott Fappiano might still be lifting weights in prison.  But after the samples were discovered by his lawyers, Mr. Fappiano finally had the evidence he had sought for half of his life. A New York State Supreme Court judge has vacated his conviction for the 1983 rape of a Brooklyn woman, after the tests showed he had not committed the crime for which he spent more than two decades in prison.  “It’s the easiest thing in the world to get into jail,” Mr. Fappiano said, “and the hardest thing in the world to get out.”

A man in prison since 1991 after being convicted of raping and killing a Peekskill High School classmate will go free now because a DNA match has linked another inmate to the crime.  Jeffrey Deskovic was 17 when a jury found him guilty of murder in the Nov. 15, 1989, death of Angela Correa. The jury knew then that DNA evidence did not match Deskovic, but jury members convicted him based on testimony from a Peekskill detective that Deskovic had confessed to the crime.

UPDATE:  The Report on the Conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic, prepared at the request of Westchester County (NY) DA Janet DiFiore, was released on July 2, 2007.  Click HERE to read the report.

Twelve-year-old J. Daniel Scruggs of Meriden, Connecticut was bullied so relentlessly at school that the Conn. Dept. of Children and Families, after inspecting his home, suggested his mother keep him out of school until a transfer could be arranged.  A few days later, the boy hanged himself in his closet.  Then the local prosecutor charged his grieving mother, Judith Scruggs, with keeping such a dirty house that it prompted the boy to commit suicide.  A jury agreed and convicted Scruggs of causing her child's suicide.  The Connecticut Supreme Court has overturned her conviction.

Think it can't happen to you?  Think only people who live on the edge, run with the wrong crowd, get into trouble can be charged with crimes they didn't commit?  And do you think the "system" will sort it out?  Think again.  Look at what happened to Lisa Hansen.  And she's lucky, because a year later, she was exonerated.  That's a rare good ending.

Kewaunee County, WI prosecutors dismissed murder charges against Beth LaBatte, 39, the woman who was once convicted — and imprisoned for 10 years — for the 1991 deaths of sisters Ceil and Ann Cadigan.  LaBatte's case was championed by the University of Wisconsin Law School's Innocence Project. The Innocence Project won motions to have evidence from the case re-analyzed using current DNA technology and planned to use those findings at trial.  Kewaunee County District Attorney Andrew Naze announced the state's decision to drop the charges as the case was gearing up to go to trial a second time.

UPDATE:  Beth LaBatte was killed in a car accident on September 2, 2007, just 13 months after she was exonerated and released from prison.

Johnny Briscoe of St. Louis, MO spent 23 years in prison for a rape and burglary he didn't commit, but he never gave up hope of proving his innocence.  Neither did investigators and attorneys retained by Centurion Ministries.  It took four searches to find the evidence that set him free: a cigarette butt from the scene with the real rapist's DNA on it.

Briscoe lost half of his life to a justice system that refused to see his innocence.  How he was convicted, how he was freed:  Trashing the Truth.

Stuart Gair, of Glasgow, Scotland, was convicted of stabbing a man to death in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison.  Gair had a solid alibi that placed him on the other side of the city at the time of the crime, but the jury believed an eyewitness who said he "studied" the killer's face.  What neither the jury nor Gair's attorneys knew was that the eyewitness had already admitted to police that he had made up most of his identification story.  Seventeen years later, Gair's conviction has finally been vacated.

UPDATE:  10/30/07 - Stuart Gair died in Edinburgh, Scotland after suffering a heart attack.  John McManus, a founder of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, said his death had been brought on by the stress of his ordeal.

Alan Newton, a former bank teller from the Bronx, has been released from prison after serving 22 years for a rape he did not commit -- a victim first of mistaken identification, then of a housekeeping problem of epic scope. For more than a decade, Mr. Newton, 44, pleaded in state and federal courts for DNA testing that was not available when he was tried, but Police Department officials said they could not find the physical evidence from the case. That evidence, a rape kit taken from a woman who was kidnapped and assaulted, was located only after a special request was made last year by a senior Bronx prosecutor to a police inspector.  The rape kit, it turned out, was in its original storage bin, ever since 1984.

A man imprisoned for more than 18 years for kidnapping and raping a woman was released after new forensic tests showed evidence from the crime did not match his DNA.  James Calvin Tillman, 44, told his family he wanted to take a quiet walk and watch the squirrels play for the first time since 1989, when he was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.  Tillman was 26 when he was charged with abducting a woman as she got into her car near a Hartford restaurant, then beating and raping her at a nearby housing project.  The victim picked out Tillman from a series of photos and he was convicted.

Orlando came to the U.S. in 1980, part of the Mariel boat-lift.  In 1982, he was convicted of raping a Key West, FL woman, a crime he did not commit, and sentenced to 55 years in prison.  He escaped in 1985 and was captured 10 years later.  Three months later, he escaped again and stayed out for a year.  Now, DNA has proven Orlando innocent of the 1982 rape.  The judge has set him free.  The prosecutor has apologized.  And U.S. Immigration has thrown him into jail, intending to deport him because while he was on the run, he failed to register and properly pursue citizenship. 

New York State Supreme Court justice Thomas Van Strydonck has freed an AIDS-stricken man who has been imprisoned a decade for a murder prosecutors now say he did not commit.  Recent DNA testing showed that Douglas Warney, 44, is innocent of the 1996 slaying of civil rights activist William Beason, prosecutors acknowledged in state Supreme Court.  Warney was convicted in 1997 of the slaying. The case against him was largely based on a confession he gave in 1996. His lawyers contended that the admission was riddled with errors, and were the rambling of a man with an IQ of 68 who suffered from AIDS-related dementia.

Eighteen years after Drew Whitley was imprisoned for life in the 1988 murder of McDonald's night manager Noreen Malloy, prosecutors are prepared to free the former West Mifflin man after a second round of DNA tests indicated he was not responsible for the killing.

A judge threw out the conviction of a man after he spent five years in prison on charges of sodomizing his teenage daughter, who had claimed repressed memories of a childhood attack.  Judge Patricia Summe found that Timothy Smith might well have been acquitted if his lawyer had challenged a prosecution expert who had backed up Katie Smith's story.

Cedric Willis, 29, of Jackson was freed after spending 12 years locked up for a crime he didn't commit, a judge ruled.  Hinds County Circuit Judge Tomie T. Green dismissed murder and armed robbery charges against Willis after District Attorney Faye Peterson made the motion.  "No one wants an innocent person in prison," Green said.

George Pitt always said the only thing he was guilty of was having bad friends, and that the only thing prosecutors put on trial was his lifestyle.  Now, 12 years after the New Brunswick (Canada) man, an admitted alcoholic, was condemned to life in prison for the rape and murder of his six-year-old stepdaughter, authorities have finally tested key evidence from the crime scene and have found none of it matches his DNA

After his amnesia cleared in prison, Christopher Bennett, of Stark County, Ohio, begged someone to test the blood on a van dashboard, sure it would prove he wasn't the driver in a fatal crash. The Ohio Innocence Project listened, and DNA tests, along with other evidence, convinced the Ohio Court of Appeals to unanimously reverse his conviction -- in spite of his guilty plea.

Alan Crotzer of Tampa, Florida stepped into the warm sunlight outside the courthouse and raised his arms to the sky, celebrating his freedom after more than 24 years behind bars for crimes he didn't commit.  A judge freed the 45-year-old Crotzer after DNA testing and other evidence convinced prosecutors he was not involved in the 1981 armed robbery and rapes that led to his 130-year prison sentence.

Don't thank the legal system for Clarence Elkins' exoneration.  The "system" failed him at every turn of an 8-year, nightmare saga.  Thank Elkins himself.  Elkins nabbed the cigarette butt discarded by another inmate, Earl Mann, and sent it to his lawyer.  Mann's DNA matched that of the person who raped and killed Elkins' mother-in-law and raped his niece.  Even then, Summit County prosecutors scraped the ground, looking for some way to keep Elkins in prison.  Only when the Attorney General and Governor became involved did the Summit County prosecutor decide to throw in the towel and free Elkins (but he is taking his time about charging the real killer).

A St. Louis, Missouri woman was viciously attacked and raped in her own home.  Stephen Judd was arrested and, inexplicably confessed, but DNA tests excluded him.  Then a cold hit matched the DNA of James Fujimoto, who had never been a suspect in the attack.  Kudos to St. Louis police and prosecutors who did not prosecute Judd anyway,  based on his false confession, and were rewarded by getting the right man.

On March 13, 1986, Pittsburgh, PA police came by Olivia Doswell's, to have a word with her son. There'd been a rape nearby, and, though Mr. Doswell bore no resemblance to the description given police, the victim and a witness picked him out of a photo array, triggering a cascade of injustice: an arrest, a conviction, and a 12- to 24-year sentence. But Doswell never strayed from his story of innocence. And on Aug. 1, 2005 he was freed - exonerated by DNA evidence.  Ironically, his honesty - the persistent claim of innocence - cost him more than guilt would have. He refused to confess to gain leniency or parole, and served at least six years more than he would have if he'd confessed. He also refused to harbor anger, adopting an attitude of such peace that he has become a model of forgiveness, his story broadcast worldwide.

Two Philadelphia, PA men who have served 18 years in prison for a 1987 homicide were granted unconditional freedom after the District Attorney's Office made a rare motion in court to nullify their convictions and drop charges against them.  The action was based on statements and polygraph examinations of a witness who exonerated the two men, and on related evidence.

It took a courtroom minute to end 15 months of limbo for Clyde A. Johnson 4th, a Philadelphia, PA social worker wrongly accused of a shooting that investigators now say could be linked to confessed serial killer Juan Covington.  Police arrested Johnson after he was picked out of a photo lineup by the victim. Unable to post $1 million bail, Johnson was detained at the city's Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.  When Covington confessed to three slayings, police took a second look at the case against Johnson. The Bryant shooting occurred around the corner from Covington's home. Bullets were tested and matched a gun owned by Covington.