![]() Free at last! |
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This sampling of recent cases
demonstrates both the potential for injustice and the difference that
individuals can make in preventing it.
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Note: We add links to updates with the original news articles reporting exonerations , so be sure to scroll down to check for "new news". |
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has been such a surge in
exonerations that we can't keep up! If you are looking for
information about an exoneree that you do not see here, please click
below and visit The National Registry of Exonerations. |
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When Cedar Park, TX police received a report that a
4-year-old boy had been sexually assaulted while at day care by someone
named "Greg,", they focused on Greg Kelley only because he lived in the
house where the day care was located. The detective never visited
the scene, and dismissed without investigation information from another
child implicating a different person as perpetrator. Greg was
convicted -- without physical evidence -- and spent 3 years in prison
before being exonerated. How was he cleared? His telephone. |
The case for Joe Giarrantano's innocence is a strong one. His was on of the first cases featured here at Truth in Justice, back in 1997. After 38 years behind bars and a close brush with execution for a rape and double murder that supporters have long claimed he did not commit, Joseph M. Giarratano has been granted parole. A Short History
of Joe's Long Ordeal
|
Robert Jones of New Orleans, LA was sent to Angola for an
April 1992 French Quarter
crime spree that included robbery, kidnapping, rape and murder even
though evidence pointed to a man named Lester Jones - no relation to
Robert - as the single culprit. He has been cleared and released,
although D.A. Leon Cannizzaro refuses to acknowledge either his
innocence or the gross misconduct of the police and prosecutors who put
him in prison. |
Brian Franklin's career with the Fort Worth, Texas police
came
to a screeching halt in 1995 when he was convicted of sexually
assaulting a child. There was no physical evidence against him,
and he
had multiple alibis demonstrating he could not have assaulted the
child. The child's false testimony convicted him, and prosecutors
let
his conviction stand even after they learned three years later that the
girl's step-father had been assaulting her. New case law in Texas
requires that people convicted on false testimony are entitled to a new
trial. This time, it only took an hour for a jury to acquit Brian. |
Charles B. Palmer, 62, of Decatur, Illinois was in custody
for 18 years, two months and one day for the murder of 32-year-old
Decatur attorney William Helmbacher in his westside apartment, first in
the Macon County Jail while awaiting trial, followed by 16½
years in the Illinois Department of Corrections. During all of
that time, Palmer knew that he was innocent. DNA tests obtained
through the efforts of the Illinois Innocence Project have proven what
Charles always knew, and now he is free. |
For the first time in 43 years on Thursday, November 17,
2016, James Robert McClurkin saw the sky from outside prison walls. He
breathed free air. It came at 10:43 a.m. It had been 43 years and
a month since the Chester native went inside Broad River Correctional
Institution. For 39 of those years, he was in for a murder he, and now
police and lawyers, say he did not commit. But in the eyes of the
law, he remains a murderer. |
This particular case happened in Denver, Colorado, to
Charles Moses-EL, but it happens all over the country, regularly.
It took Charles 29 years, 2 months and 28 days to disentangle himself
from a rape he didn’t commit, a 48-year prison sentence for a wrongful
conviction, and the web of deceit spun by Denver authorities.
Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s office re-prosecuted
Moses-EL even though new evidence led a judge to vacate his convictions
last December after he spent 28 years in prison. That evidence included
the confession of a convicted rapist who was the first man the victim
identified as her assailant. It also included the testimony of the
confessor’s former girlfriend that he slipped out of her house in the
middle of the night right when her best friend and neighbor was
attacked. And forensic analysis showing that sperm found in the
victim’s body matched the confessor’s blood type, not
Moses-EL’s. On November 14, 2016, a jury found him not
guilty. |
Link: A special interactive report brought to you by journalnow.com A Special ReportThe Attack at the Silk Plant Forest JournalNow Edition *
Winston-Salem, N.C. *
November 21-25, 2004
On Dec.
9,
1995 Jill Marker was brutally beaten in the back of The Silk Plant
Forest,
then located in the Silas Creek Shopping Center. Two years later,
Kalvin
Michael Smith was arrested for the crime. This six month re-examination
of
the case is based on hundreds of pages of police reports and interviews
with
Marker, her family and others.
UPDATE: 1/9/2009 - The hearing on Kalvin Smith’s post-conviction petition took place over this past few week with the primary claims focusing on ineffectiveness of Smith’s trial counsel and Brady violations concerning evidentiary materials which the prosecution and police failed to disclose to the defense. Smith also testified about the circumstances under which he confessed, a confession he has always maintained was false and spoon-fed to him by detectives. In a brief ruling from the bench after closing arguments, Forsyth County Superior Court Judge Richard Doughton dashed the hopes of Smith and all of his supporters who packed the courtroom:“My conclusion is that the defendant has failed to prove his claim, and of these remaining claims, and I’m going to rule in favor of the state.” Smith and his attorneys have vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, another investigation into the case is still ongoing. The City Council assigned a Citizen’s Review Committee to hold hearings on the case to investigate whether there was any police or prosecutorial misconduct, a committee whose mandate was broadened to do intensive fact-finding on the case not unlike an Innocence Commission in March 2008. Perhaps this Committee’s findings can lead to newly discovered evidence that can once again reopen the case for Smith. UPDATE: 11/10/2016: Kalvin Michael Smith ordered freed after 20 years in prison; supporters will still push for exoneration. |
Maybe you saw the 2010 episode on Dateline, about the
creepy security guard in Palmdale, CA who murders the lovely co-ed, and
is brought to justice soley through the brainpower of retired
FBI-profiler Mark Safarik. If you did, you were had, just as the
jury and court of appeals were had. The death of Michelle O'Keefe
was caused by a local gang-banger who robbed her. Raymond Lee
Jennings has been exonerated. Profiler Mark Safarik still grouses
that he was right, because an exoneration like this is really bad for
is business. |
On June 10, 2016, Kimberly Long's conviction for murdering
her boyfriend was reversed and the Corona, California woman was
released from prison on bail. She is not out of the woods yet;
the DA may decide to recharge her. But the evidence is on her
side, as shown in the June, 2015 article published by the CV
Independent (click Kimberly's name, above). |
William Haughey of Putnam County, NY spent 8 years in
prison for a fire declared to be arson by a fire investigator, Robert
Geoghegan, who failed to rule out electrical or other accidental
causes. He enlisted support from the Jeffery
Deskovic Foundation, and kept up a letter-writing campaign. Among
those he contacted was Robert Tendy, then running for Putnam County
District Attorney against the DA who prosecuted him. Mr. Tendy
was elected and took a careful look at the evidence in the case.
On May 2, 2016, he asked the Court to vacate Mr. Haughey's conviction
and, in spite of opposition by the New York Attorney General, Mr.
Haughey was freed. |
After 25 years, Darryl Pinkins of Gary, Indiana has been released from prison. He was convicted of participating in a gang rape, tagged because he worked with a man whose coveralls were recovered at the crime scene. Darryl surely understands Keith Harward's statement, that police and prosecutors "weren't looking for the truth, they were looking for a conviction." It was a classic combination: None of the DNA evidence at the time could be matched to Pinkins, but the victim identified him as one of her attackers and an inmate who shared a cell with him testified Pinkins confessed to the rape. |
It was a horrific crime. In 1982, in
Newport News, VA, a young man in
a sailor's uniform broke into a local home, beat a man to death, then
spent hours raping his wife while their three small children slept in
the next room. Keith Harward was convicted based on bite mark
evidence
sworn to by two dentists, and his identification by a security guard
who police had hypnotized first. Bite mark analysis is junk
evidence,
as demonstrated by recent DNA tests that exclude
Mr. Harward as the perpetrator. But that should be no surprise to
the
original prosecutors, because they had simple blood test evidence that excluded him back in 1982.
They withheld it from the defense and sought the death penalty. UPDATE: 4/3/16 - The killer and rapist was Jerry Crotty, a sailor stationed on the USS Carl Vinson at the time. He was identified in a DNA cold hit. Crotty died in prison in Ohio in 2006. UPDATE: 4/8/16 - The Virginia Supreme Court granted Harward's actual innocence writ and he was immediately released from prison. He repeatedly referred to the police, prosecutors and forensic scientists who helped convict him as criminals. Asked if he blamed anyone for his ordeal, he said, “In my case, the egos of those criminals, and I say criminals because I’m talking about those people in Newport News … (who) went out of their way to convict me, they weren’t looking for the truth. They were looking for a conviction.” |
In 2012, Jack McCullough was convicted of committing
Sycamore, Illinois' most notorious murder, the abduction and killing of
7-year-old Maria Ridulph in December, 1957.
The state's case rested on the identification by Kathy
Sigman Chapman, Maria's playmate, of McCullough in what the State's
Attorney calls a photo lineup that was "suggestive in the
extreme." What put McCullough's innocence over the top, however,
were telephone toll records from his parents' phone that show he was in
Rockford, Illinois, 35 miles away, when the crime occurred. |
Prosecutors in Charlotte, NC have dismissed indictments
against Timothy Bridges, who spent 27 years in prison for a rape he did
not commit. The victim gave varying descriptions
of her attacker and never identified Bridges. He was convicted on
the strength of microscopic hair comparison of two strands of hair,
which an FBI-trained forensic technician testified came from
Bridges. If offered today, the hair evidence would be
inadmissible, and without the hair evidence, there was insufficient
evidence to convict Mr. Bridges. |
Technically, Raymond Tempest of Woonsocket, RI was never a
cop. It was his close ties to law enforcement that targeted him
and
played a key role in his 1992 conviction for the 1982 murder of Doreen
Picard. Tempest is the brother of former
Woonsocket police detective
Gordon Tempest and the son of the late Raymond
Tempest Sr., who was the former second-in-command of the Woonsocket
police and the sitting high sheriff for Providence County when the
murder took place. On July 13, 2015, Judge Daniel
Procaccini overturned the conviction and released Tempest to home
confinement, pending the state's appeal. |
Floyd Bledsoe of Oskaloosa, Kansas spent
15 years in prison, having been convicted of murdering a 14-year-old
girl, Millie Arfmann, in 1999. His brother, Tom,
was the state's key witness. The University of
Kansas’ Innocence Project got involved and DNA
was uncovered linking Tom Bledsoe to the crime. Tom Bledsoe then killed
himself in Bonner Springs. Floyd's conviction was vacated and he
left prison on December 8, 2015, a free man. We could find little in reports of Floyd's exoneration about how his brother was able to frame him in the first place, until we located an earlier article written by Joe Miller for The Pitch titled "Brother's Keeper." We have included it in the coverage here. |
Donovan Allen, of Cowlitz County,
Washington, was 18 when his mother, Sharon Cox, was murdered.
After 14 hours of interrogation, police got a confession out of
him. That was bolstered by testimony from two jailhouse snitches
-- who were rewarded with breaks on their own criminal charges
-- and Donovan was convicted of killing his mother in 2002.
He was sentenced to life without parole. Now DNA shows that
Donovan's cousin by adoption, Brian Kitts, committed the murder.
Kitts, of course, helped police and prosecutors convict Donovan, and
testified at Donovan's trial. Donovan has been released; Kitts
has been charged. |
Perhaps
only Roger Dean Gillispie knows for sure whether he kidnapped and
raped three Fairborn, Ohio area women in 1988. No physical
evidence tied him to the crime. He was convicted on the basis of
eyewitness identifications
made two years after the crimes occurred. His case illustrates
the
tough road for inmates who insist they are innocent but cannot use DNA
to
prove it. UPDATE: 7/9/08 - Roger's petition for a new trial was denied at the local court level. The judge found that the eyewitness identification issues were "fully litigated" before Roger's first conviction, that the defense "should have known" about discovery violations, and that the defense has no new information about an alternative suspect whose official presence goes back to the beginning of the case. The Ohio Innocence Project, representing Roger, will appeal. UPDATE: 12/15/11 - U.S. District Magistrate Judge Michael R. Merz has ruled that Roger Dean Gillispie didn’t get a fair trial when he was convicted of rape, kidnapping and aggravated robbery in 1991 and ordered the state to either retry him by July 1 or free him from prison. Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro is one of Gillispie's advocates; the current Ohio Attorney General vows to appeal. A classic case of false identification and prosecutor intractability. UPDATE: 12/23/11 - Roger Gillispie has been released from prison on recognizance bond, wearing an electronic monitor and kept under house arrest. His legal saga could continue for years. UPDATE: 11/30/15 -- A state court has barred retrial and dismissed the indictment against Dean with prejudice. |
Steven Chaney became the twenty-sixth person to be wrongly
convicted or indicted based on bite mark evidence. The two dental
experts who testified against him have also testified in numerous other
cases—and they’ve been wrong before. |
It would be an unusual abduction strategy for anyone,
particularly for a 52-year-old grocery store manager and
Barboursville, VA family man. Yet despite a lack of any physical
evidence tying him to the scene and despite a reported later admission
by the alleged victim that her tale was “an elaborate scam,” Mark
Lawrence Weiner was convicted of abduction with intent to
defile and jailed for more than 2 years. Only
when the victim was caught selling cocaine did the prosecutor stop
believing her, and join the defense in a motion to vacate the
conviction. Mark Weiner’s freedom did not come about because the
system worked. It came about because the system protected the system
from abject embarrassment. That isn’t justice. That’s just sad. |
Another Brooklyn case bites the dust, but only after a
quarter century of prosecutors hiding the evidence Ruddy Quezada sought
to win a new trial. It turns out the crimes weren't committed by
Mr. Quezada, but by the police and prosecutors who went after him. |
Between January, 2014, when Kenneth Thompson became
Brooklyn, NY District Attorney, and August, 2015, the wrongful
convictions of fourteen people have been vacated: William Lopez,
Jonathan Fleming, Darryl Austin, Robert Hill, Alveanna Jennette, Willie
Stuckey, Jr., Derrick Hamilton, Michael Waithe, Carlos Davis and Joel
Fowler. It is unlikely that any of these people would have been
exonerated but for the work of the Conviction Review Unit initiated by
DA Thompson. But before you point fingers at Brooklyn as some
kind of aberration, consider that review units in other big cities with
high crime rates are almost certain to find the same rate of wrongful
convictions. The worst part: In almost half of wrongful
convictions, no crime occurred in the first place. |
Jason Strong, convicted of murder before authorities
determined the victim's
identity, is focusing his push to clear his name in part on DNA, a
forensic tool that has exonerated four men of rape or murder in Lake
County, Illinois since 2010. Additionally, his former
girlfriend says she lied to accommodate police, and his alleged
accomplices have recanted their incriminating statements. UPDATE: On May 28, 2015, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly signed an order mandating Strong's release. He has returned to his home in Tennessee. |
Mr. Wagstaffe, 45, is in the 22nd year of a 25-year
maximum sentence for a kidnapping that led to the death of Jennifer
Negron, 16, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. From the
beginning, he has maintained his innocence. He had an alibi,
having spent the entire time when the kidnapping occurred with his
girlfriend, Joann Butler. He gave police her name and phone
number, but they never contacted her. She says she has yet to
hear from any attorneys or investigators. And she's still willing
to testify. UPDATE: On July 29, 2015, Everton Wagstaffe was fully exonerated. |
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Ten years after Vickie
Barton was murdered on the farm she and her
husband, Lt. Jim Barton of the Springboro (OH) Police Department owned,
Jim was charged and convicted of masterminding her death. The
evidence? The word of a jailhouse snitch and notorious liar and
the prosecution's interpretation of Barton's 911 call for help.
Listen to the audio -- decide for yourself whether Barton said "I gotta
call for help" or "I gotta call Phelp." UPDATE: On May 15, 2015, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals REVERSED Jim Barton's conviction and GRANTED his petition for habeas. He was freed on bond in April, 2016, and finally out from under this cloud when he reached a plea agreement with the state. |
In 1994, Gary Gathers and Keith Mitchell were sentenced to
36 years to life for murder in Washington, D.C. They were exonerated in
April 2015 after it was revealed that a detective had lied at their
trial and that the prosecution had concealed evidence that pointed to
other suspects. |
Kia Stewart of New Orleans, LA, convicted on murder
charges in a pre-Hurricane Katrina killing in the Lafitte housing
projects, had his conviction vacated and murder charges dropped Monday
(April 13, 2015). After spending nearly 10 years of a life
sentence behind bars for the killing of Bryant "B.J." Craig Jr., Kia
Stewart, 27, was able to walk out of the Orleans Parish Criminal
Courthouse a free man. |
On April 3, 2015, Anthony Ray Hinton of Birmingham,
Alabama was released from Death Row after 30 years for a murder he did
not commit and could not have committed. Prosecutors told a judge
they won't re-try him for the 1985 slayings of two fast-food managers
after new testing couldn't match crime scene bullets to a gun found in
Hinton's house. Thirty years. Think about how long that is. And for the last ten years, the State of Alabama has known the jig is up, but they have dug in and done everything they can to preserve the conviction. Click on Mr. Hinton's name and read a 2005 news report establishing how much was known a decade ago. It's a shame these prosecutors don't show the same diligence in searching for truth. |
Three East Cleveland, Ohio men are one step closer to freedom after being wrongly incarcerated for 18 years. Derrick Wheatt, Laurese Glover and Eugene Johnson had their convictions for the 1995 murder of Clifton Hudson Jr. thrown out after nearly a decade of legal advocacy from the Ohio Innocence Project (OIP). Their impending freedom comes after a key eyewitness recanted her testimony and the revelation that information from police reports that cast doubt on the defendants’ guilt had not been disclosed to the trial team years earlier. |
A Walworth County, WI prosecutor and defense attorney
erred, and a detective gave “false testimony,” combining to send a teen
to juvenile prison for arson in a 2013 case, the state Court of Appeals
has ruled. The court wrote that Walworth County sheriff's
Detective Jeffrey Recknagel “gave demonstrably false testimony” and
that the assistant district attorney compounded the problem by
introducing inadmissible testimony and arguing evidence that was not
true. This is a change of course for the Wisconsin Court of
Appeals, which has traditionally allowed false and inadmissible
testimony on the theory that it is up to the trier of fact (usually a
jury) to figure it out. |
Christopher Abernathy of Park Forest, Illinois was
convicted of raping and killing a girl in 1984, when he was 17 years
old. He became the focus of investigation after a friend told
police Mr. Abernathy had confessed to him. He has always said
that the confession police obtained from his was coerced and false, and
his mother has always believed in his innocence. DNA tests have
confirmed, 30 years later, that they got the wrong guy, and Mr.
Abernathy has been released into a world that scares him. |
In 2002, Edward Freiburger was found guilty of the 1961 murder of taxi driver John Orne. The key evidence was testimony by a Missouri firearms expert that fragments from a gun owned by Mr. Freiburger matched fragments from bullet parts in Orner’s skull. SC experts did not agree, so they were not called to testify. The prosecution also failed to disclose a 1961 letter from a SC ballistics expert concluding that the bullets were fired from another suspect's gun. The SC Court of Appeals has reversed Mr. Freiburger's conviction. |
In 1998, Mario Vasquez of Green Bay, WI was convicted of
molesting a 4-year-old girl. Seventeen years later, the victim,
now 21 years old, says that her uncle and her father molested her, but
Mr. Vasquez did not. His conviction has been overturned and he
has been freed. |
When Marshall Morgan, Jr., a basketball
star at the Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago, was shot to death in his car in
1993, police zeroed in on Tyrone Hood because his fingerprint was found
in trash left in the victim's car, and he lived near the school.
Police never looked at the victim's father, Marshall Morgan, Sr., who
got $50,000 insurance from his son's death. The senior Morgan
insured and killed two more people before he got caught, and he was
still not charged in one of those murders. And Tyrone Hood, a
family man who did nothing wrong, is still in prison. UPDATE: August 4, 2014 - Cook County State's Attorney A Anita Alvarez is long on talk but short on remedy with her "Conviction Integrity Unit." James Papa, the assistant state’s attorney supervising the new unit, traveled around the country to interview convicts. A year after Alvarez formed the Conviction Integrity Unit, Papa went before a judge to share its findings on Hood. He did not recommend overturning the conviction. He offered no explanation. The Cook County DA is not concerned with innocence or guilt, but asks only, ‘How is this going to wash politically?’ Journalist Nicholas Schmidle has conducted a better investigation than the Chicago cops or Cook County prosecutors. He finds the case against Tyrone Hood to be Crime Fiction. UPDATE: February 9, 2015 - Last month, outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn commuted Mr. Hood's sentence and he was freed, although he on a form of parole with an electronic monitor on his ankle. Today, in a surprise move, Cook County State's Attorney Alvarez asked a court to dismiss the charges against Mr. Hood. He is finally, truly free. |
In 1979, James Hugney of East Shore, PA was convicted of
murder and arson in a house fire that took the life of his son. Experts
for the state testified the fire was an arson based on pour patterns
around the bed of James Hugney Jr. There were, in fact, no pour
patterns, and three international fire scientists could
not conclude the fire as an arson using modern fire science.
After 36 years, James Hugney has been freed from prison. |
The Bladen County, North Carolina district attorney agrees
former Fayetteville resident Joseph Sledge, imprisoned since 1978 for
double murder, is innocent of the crime, Sledge's lawyer
announced. This decision should pave the way for the 70-year-old
Sledge to go free. UPDATE: Mr. Sledge was, indeed, fully exonerated by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission and released from prison on January 24, 2015. |
The way Derrick Hamilton tells it, his detour to a false
conviction in a fatal 1991 shooting began with an investigator greeting
him with a mob-style kiss on the cheek and whispering in his ear.
Hamilton says Detective Louis Scarcella whispered that he was going to
put him away - and then set about framing him. Hamilton ended up
spending 21 years behind bars before finally finding vindication on
January 9, 2015 in a New York City courtroom. |
On October 2, 2006, Hannah Overton of Corpus Christi, TX
and
her husband rushed their foster son to a hospital, where the child died
of
salt poisoning related to an eating disorder that led
him
to gorge and to consume strange objects. Less than a year later,
Hannah
was convicted of capital murder
based on the theory that she waited too long--less than an hour--before
rushing the boy to the hospital. Bennett
Gershman, a
nationally recognized expert on prosecutorial misconduct,
reviewed
Hannah's case and stated, “A conviction for capital murder can’t rest
on
such a flimsy, almost incredibly thin reed, as this one rests on. It
rests
on sand." UPDATE: On December 16, 2014, Hannah was released on $50,000 bond, pending the retrial that Nueces County DA Mark Skurka says he will pursue, again for capital murder. Her release comes over two months after the highest appellate court in Texas overturned her murder conviction and life sentence. UPDATE: On April 8, 2015, all charges against Hannah were dismissed. |
The state Supreme Court has ordered a new trial for LeeVester Brown, of Coahoma County, Mississippi, who was convicted by the testimony of now-discredited Dr. Steven Hayne, citing the now-disputed Shaken Baby Syndrome. His 2006 conviction was thrown out because the trial judge refused to provide him funds to hire an expert. At trial, Brown told jurors he was innocent, saying he freely spoke to police “because I didn’t have nothing to hide because I know I didn’t do anything to hurt my baby.” |
Anthony Chapparo
Editor's Note: The
following text is the entire and only news report about Mr.
Chapparo's exoneration. If readers find more comprehensive
reporting regarding this miscarriage of justice online, please let us
know by sending an email.ELIZABETH, N.J. - (AP) -- Authorities in Union County say a man convicted of sexual assault 12 years ago has been exonerated by DNA evidence. Anthony Chaparro was awaiting retrial for the crime last month when investigators re-examined the physical evidence in the case. Though an initial test in 2002 didn't reveal any DNA, laboratory staff at the Union County prosecutor's office were able to retrieve DNA using modern techniques. The sample didn't match the 60-year-old Perth Amboy resident. A state judge granted a motion to dismiss the charge earlier this week. Union County Prosecutor Grace H. Park says the investigation into the assault is active. The victim had identified Chaparro in a photo array shortly after the assault, and he was convicted in 2003. |
Ricky Jackson, of Cleveland, Ohio, was
imprisoned for 39 years, serving a life sentence for
aggravated murder and other charges, according to state prison
records.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said the case fell apart
after witness Eddie Vernon recanted. Vernon -- who was 12 years old at
the time -- said he had been fed
details of the crime by police and kept quiet about his lies because
investigators had threatened to imprison his parents.
Co-defendant Wiley Bridgeman was also released on the same day, Nov.
21, 2014. UPDATE: December 9, 2014 - Co-defendant Kwame Ajamu was released from prison in 2003, and worked hard to make a new life for himself. On December 9, 2014, all charges against him were dismissed. This should make it easier for Kwame and his co-defendants to receive compensation for their many years in prison. |
Michael Hanline Michael Hanline, who years
ago lived in the San Fernando Valley of California, has spent
more than 36 years behind bars for murder for which he was wrongfully
convicted and is expected to be released November 24, 2014. But
prosecutors, who said newly tested DNA evidence does not match the
Hanline, are leaving the door open for a new trial. (Editor's Note: Prosecutor's take the
position they may not always be right, but they are never wrong.
We predict that they will wait as long as they can -- depends on the
judge's order, but likely 90 days -- and the quietly drop the
charge. This should keep Mr. Hanline from getting any
compensation for his wrongful conviction.)
UPDATE: April 22, 2015 - Just as we predicted, the prosecutor has dropped all charges against Michael Hanline. It's pretty hard to proceed when the lead investigator committed perjury to get the conviction in the first place. |
Dennis Lee Allen and Stanley Orson Mozee walked out of a Dallas County courtroom on October 28, 2014 after a judge ruled that their murder convictions from 2000 should be overturned based on previously withheld evidence. District Attorney Craig Watkins and his Conviction Integrity Unit agreed that the (then) prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence and joined the lawyers for Allen and Mozee in seeking Tuesday’s ruling that the pair did not receive a fair trial on that basis |
Cleared of the murder that had put him behind bars for
almost 30 years, David McCallum sobbed and thought of the man who
wasn't there with him. Co-defendant Willie Stuckey's conviction
also had just been thrown out after Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth
Thompson concluded the two confessed falsely as teenagers to kidnapping
and killing a stranger and taking a joyride in his car. But Stuckey
wasn't in court Wednesday to be freed. He died in prison in 2001. |
Susan Mellen of Los Angeles, CA, who spent 17 years in prison after being convicted of murder in the death of a homeless man,was exonerated on October 10, 2014 by a Los Angeles County judge who said she should not spend another minute behind bars. Mellen was convicted of the 1997 killing based solely on the testimony of a notorious liar. The mother of three was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. |
Jamie Lee Peterson of Kalkaska, Michigan, is set to be
freed from prison, 16 years after his conviction for the 1996 rape and
murder of a Kalkaska woman. On Friday the county's prosecutor said he'd
drop charges after new DNA evidence failed to match Peterson to the
crime. The crime scene DNA turned out to be a match to Jason
Anthony Ryan, 36, of Davison, who was charged in Montgomery's death in
December, 2013. |
In 1984, the mentally challenged half-brothers from
Robeson County, NC were convicted of the rape and murder of 12-year-old
Sabrina Buie the previous year, and were sentenced to death. The
only evidence against them are confessions written by police
investigators and signed by the brothers. Subsequent retrials
result in convictions; Henry stays on Death Row while Leon gets
life. In July, 2014, DNA test results link a convicted rapist and
killer, Roscoe Artis, to the crime. At last, on September 2,
2014, the brothers are declared innocent and ordered released from
prison. |
In 1990, Michael Phillips accepted a plea deal,
even though he knew he did not commit the rape with which he was
charged. He figured he'd never get a fair trial in Dallas'
heavily biased system due to his race. He served 12 years, but
was branded a sex offender, so he was never actually free. Then,
in a first of its kind case, the Dallas DA's Convicton Integrity Unit
notified him that DNA proved
his innocence. He went from convicted rapist to millionaire in
one swoop. |
Mark Woodworth
When Mark Woodworth's
neighbors were attacked during the night at their farm home near
Chillicothe, MO, killing the wife and seriously injuring the husband,
the attacker was identified by the surviving victim as his daughter's
"psycho" ex-boyfriend. Nonetheless, local authorities zeroed in
on 16-year-old Mark Woodworth. Then they brought in Asst. AG wiz
kid Kenny Hulshof to turn innuendo and speculation into conviction --
not once, but twice. Now, at long last, the evidence hidden in
order to get two convictions has surfaced. Will there finally be
justice for Mark?
UPDATE: 7/15/2014 -- After studying the evidence and finding it insufficient, a special prosecutor decided Mark Woodworth should not be tried a third time in connection with the 1990 shooting death of neighbor Cathy Robertson in her home near Chillicothe, Mo. “There wasn’t any evidence that made me believe that Mark Woodworth was guilty,” said former Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Don Norris, who filed the dismissal Tuesday afternoon in Platte County Circuit Court. Norris had been appointed as special prosecutor earlier this year. |
On a rain-drenched night in the summer of 1997, Sherwin
Gibbons was
shot dead, murdered as he sipped a beer in the vestibule of a building
in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. A suspect, Roger
Logan, was arrested, convicted and sentenced
to 25 years to life in prison for the murder. Nearly 17 years
later, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office took on
the task of discovering what really happened in the vestibule --
because Roger Logan is innocent. |
Randall Mills didn't rape that 12-year-old girl in March
1999. It's a truth he bore for 11 years and three months in a
Tennessee
prison cell. Few believed him until DNA evidence in 2008 proved he
didn't sexually assault a preteen neighbor. It was three more years
before he was released from prison — and even then he still faced being
tried on the charges all over again. But on April 4, 2014, in light of
the DNA evidence and a wavering victim, prosecutors in Marshall County
finally dropped all charges. |
Nineteen years have passed since Darryl Anthony Howard of
Durham, NC buried his head in his hands in a Durham County Superior
Court room and sobbed at the three guilty verdicts returned by the
jury. “I didn’t do it,” Howard said pounding his fist against the
defense table. “I didn’t kill those girls, I can’t believe it.”
Now, attorneys with the Innocence Project say
new DNA evidence points to a career criminal known to be associated
with
The New York Boys, a gang of drug dealers who were in Durham in the
1990s -- and to evidence of Mr. Howard's innocence that was
deliberately concealed by DA Mike Nifong. UPDATE - May 27, 2014: In an opinion released today, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson overturned Darryl Howard’s conviction. Judge Hudson’s decision finds for the defense on every major claim. It’s a resounding repudiation of the way DA Mike Nifong handled Howard’s trial. Read the opinion. |
In
1998, a criminal dubbed "the
Bronx rapist" terrorized the community. The police sketch of him
looked so much like Tyrone Hicks that his own parents turned him
in. A
victim identified him, and Tyrone was convicted and served 10 years in
prison. Even after his release, he was determined to prove his
innocence, and with the help of New York Law School’s Post-Conviction
Innocence Clinic, he has done so. DNA testing has demonstrated
Tyrone
is innocent.
|
Following
a stunning admission of intentional abuse decades ago at the hands of
prosecutors — including one who became a judge and then landed in
federal prison for his role in a judicial corruption scandal that
rocked the Jefferson Parish courthouse — Reginald Adams walked free on
May 12, 2014, exonerated after 34 years behind bars on a murder
rap.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro didn’t stop with a
concession that Ronald Bodenheimer and another former prosecutor,
Harold “Tookie” Gilbert Jr., deliberately hid a detailed police report
in the case in two separate trials. The legacy of former DA Harry
Connick continues. |
A timeworn phone bill from a Quality Inn in Orlando, Fla.,
turned out to be one of the most valuable pieces of paper Jonathan
Fleming owns. Mr. Fleming, 51, who was serving the 25th year of a
sentence of 25 years to life after being found guilty of a 1989 murder
in Brooklyn, NY was released on Tuesday after new evidence was
uncovered in his case. The evidence included a receipt that established
he was in Florida less than five hours before the killing. |
Christopher L. Coleman, who was convicted of taking part
in an armed home invasion and related crimes in Peoria in 1994,
languished behind bars for more than 19 years until he was released on
bond in November 2013 after the Illinois Supreme Court reversed his
conviction and remanded his case for a retrial based on “compelling
evidence of actual innocence.” In March 2014, the Peoria County State’s
Attorney’s office dropped the charges. |
Glenn Ford, of Shreveport, Louisiana, has been on death
row since 1985 for the 1983 murder of a local jeweler. The Capital
Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana's recently filed habeas petition cites new
information that another man, Jake Robinson, committed the
murder. Robinson told an informant that he thought by now Ford
would have been executed. UPDATE: March 11, 2014 -- Glenn Ford, sentenced to death for killing a man whose lawn he used to mow, was not even at the scene of the crime, according to new evidence used to free him from death row this week. Freed after 30 years on Death Row. |
Twenty years ago, a Baltimore, MD jury convicted Sabein of
murdering his girlfriend. Shortly after his
conviction, another man confessed to
carrying out the killing with a notorious hit man. Then two years ago,
the victim's son, who witnessed the killing as a boy, came forward to
say Burgess didn't do it. And the forensic evidence has been challenged
as shaky. At last, the evidence reached a tipping pointJ.
Judge Charles J. Peters ordered a new trial, and Assistant
State's Attorney Antonio Gioia -- who refuses to acknowledge Sabein's
innocence -- dropped all charges. |
Anthony Yarbough and Sharrif Wilson, both of Brooklyn, NY, were arrested in June 1992 in the slaying of Yarbough's 40-year-old mother, his 12-year-old sister and another 12-year-old girl in a Coney Island housing project. They were freed after 21 years when DNA evidence from under Yarbough's mother's fingernails matched sperm from the 1999 unsolved rape and murder of Migdalia Ruiz of Brooklyn, which took place after they had been wrongly convicted. |
The Neal Rankin murder case has confounded Akron, Ohio
authorities
for 17 years — and could be reopened through the science of DNA
testing.
It took Akron police 15 months to make the first arrest in the Rankin
case,
and when it was announced in May 1994, the commander of the homicide
unit
told reporters: ''We had 45 suspects the first day.'' In fact,
aggravated
murder charges would be filed and dismissed against others before the
final
suspect, Dewey Amos Jones III, was convicted for the slaying of Rankin,
a
71-year-old Goodyear retiree. Now the case is returning to the
Summit
County justice system in the aftermath of a judge's order to conduct
DNA
testing — for the first time — on preserved samples of biological
evidence
from the crime scene. UPDATE: January 30, 2014 - Jones’ conviction was overturned in 2012 by Summit County Judge Mary Margaret Rowlands after testing of crime-scene evidence showed no match to Jones when compared with his DNA. But the attorney general’s office went ahead with plans to re-try Jones until it unexpectedly filed a motion to dismiss the murder charges. An hour after the charges were dismissed, Mr. Jones was freed. |
A New Haven, CT detective said he’d been framed. That
didn’t help. The FBI
concluded he’d been framed. That didn’t help. Finally, 21 years after
his
arrest for a spectacular double-murder he swore he never committed,
Scott Lewis got to take his quest for freedom to a federal judge—and
returned to jail with a glimmer of hope. UPDATE: January 11, 2014 - Federal District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. has ruled the state committed a Brady violation by failing to disclose evidence that was favorable to Lewis and impeached the testimony of the key witness for the prosecution. He ordered that Lewis be released within 60 days unless the state declares its intention to retry him. |
A Seattle, Washington area man spent his first Christmas
in more than a
decade with his family after the Innocence Project Northwest convinced
King County prosecutors to take a new look at his conviction for
robbery and burglary. He had been convicted of viciously beating
a man after the victim picked him out of a photo montage, despite the
fact that Brandon looked nothing like the assailants the man had
described. |
It was a plot straight from Downton Abbey -- a wife dies
from poison a week after writing a letter to her neighbor saying that
if anything happened to her, her husband "would be [the] first
suspect." Like John Bates, Lord Grantham's valet, Mark Jensen of
Kenosha, WI was convicted of murdering his wife, largely on the
strength of the letter. State appellate courts called the judge's
admission of the letter "harmless error." Federal Judge William
Griesbach disagreed, and reversed Jensen's conviction. |
After spending more than half of his life behind bars for
a crime he didn’t commit, Stanley Wrice of Chicago, IL was released
December 11, 2013, after the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his case
Tuesday, citing misconduct of Chicago police officers. Stanley
was tortured and forced to confess to a rape he did not commit by
officers working under former Lt. Jon Burge. |
Back in 2002, in Tampa, FL, Cheydrick's girlfriend's
14-year-old daughter told authorities -- in graphic detail -- of the
nightmarish sexual assault she said Cheydrick perpetrated against
her. Although her story changed over time, neither prosecution
nor defense thought it necessary to perform DNA tests on the evidence
from the case. Cheydrick was convicted and spent 9 years in
prison, until post-conviction DNA tests showed the attack had never
happened. |
On Monday, November 18, 2013, a Brooklyn Supreme Court jury needed just nine minutes to decide that Derrick Deacon was innocent of the crime that kept him behind bars for 24 years. Chalk it up as another wrongful conviction coming out of the Kings County District Attorney's office. And as testimony from Deacon's appeal effort revealed, this one was dirty. |
Sitting in the Texas prison where she's spent nearly half
of her life,
Elizabeth Ramirez is stunned by the words that could help exonerate her
and three friends of the sexual assault of her two nieces, a crime she
said she couldn't fathom let alone commit. It never happened, one
niece now says of the debauched, orgy-like
nightmare that she and her older sister described to San Antonio police
in 1994 when they were 7 and 9. “I want my aunt and her friends
out of prison,” Stephanie, 25, said by
phone last week. “Whatever it takes to get them out I'm going to do. I
can't live my life knowing that four women are sleeping in a cage
because of me.” UPDATE: November 17, 2013 - Three of the four San Antonio women, now known as the “San Antonio Four,” could be released on bond by a judge Monday, November 18th. They have maintained their innocence since being accused in the bizarre assault of Ramirez's two young nieces nearly 20 years ago. Vasquez was released on parole last year. UPDATE: November 23, 2016 - The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the so-called “San Antonio 4” — Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera and Anna Vasquez — were innocent. The decision will allow the criminal records of all four women to be expunged. |
In 1979, Brenda Anderson testified that a young man with whom she had gone to high school shot her elderly neighbor to death. Thirty-four years later, Anderson's sister Sharon took the stand and said the account, which helped send the young man to prison, was a lie. On November 7, 2013, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge sided with Sharon Anderson and threw out the conviction of Kash Delano Register, who maintained his innocence during more than three decades as inmate No. C11693. |
For
two years, police investigated the brutal 2001 Halloween night slaying
of newspaper editor Kent Heitholt in Columbia, Mo. They had no viable
suspects
and the victim's family had come to terms this crime might never be
solved.
But then police heard that a young man told a friend that he had
dreamed
he participated in the killing and also named an accomplice to the
murder:
his good friend, Ryan Ferguson. UPDATE: 11/12/13 - A Missouri appeals court has thrown out Ryan's conviction. Missouri Attorney General declines to retry him, and Ryan is released after 10 years in prison. Click HERE to visit Freed Ryan Ferguson. |
On Sept. 28, 2000, Kim Camm and her two children were victims of a triple murder in New Albany, Ind. They were found shot to death at home in their garage. But just hours after the memorial service, police arrested their prime suspect, David Camm, for murdering his wife and two children. Camm, who claims his innocence, has a very good alibi. Eleven witnesses say they were with him at the time of the murder. Nonetheless, he was convicted. His conviction was overturned in August, 2004 -- but the charges were reissued and Camm was convicted again at retrial. |
![]() David Camm
|
UPDATE
- June 30, 2009 - David Camm's second conviction has been
overturned. Prosecutors say they intend to retry him.
UPDATE - October 30, 2013 -- David Camm's third trial has ended in a NOT GUILTY verdict. His 13-year nightmare is over. Now, at long last, he can grieve his family, and begin to rebuild his life. |
Two Detroit area brothers who have been imprisoned for
nearly 25 years have new hope of exoneration. A
man who says he never told police what he saw that night has
come forward and is expected to testify that the killers were black. He
knows this, he says,
because he saw them up close. And the Highers are white. UPDATE: September 25, 2013 - Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy has dismissed the murder charges against the HIghers brothers, ending a saga of 25 years in prison and another year waiting and worrying that they might go back. |
Carl Chatman, a Chicago homeless man in prison for raping
a clerk at the Daley Center,
will have his conviction set aside. His lawyers
argued on appeal that the alleged victim fabricated the assault in a
scheme to sue the county. |
David Flores was told not to testify. So he sat in silence
in
1997 while prosecutors convinced a jury that he had murdered an
innocent
woman caught in a gang-related gunbattle during rush-hour
traffic. Now, Flores and his new attorney claim
to have new evidence
that he was not responsible for the shooting death of Phyllis
Davis. A national expert says the most powerful
revelation
uncovered by Flores' defense could set him free: A gang member told the
FBI
and Los Angeles police before Flores' trial that another man, Raphael
Robinson, shot Davis. When Flores was sentenced, jury foreman Samuel McCrorey said he regretted the verdict: "I feel horrible that a young man is going to prison for life for a crime he didn't commit." McCrorey was lambasted by the trial judge for his honesty. Click HERE to read about the attack launched against Mr. McCrorey by Judge Richard Blane, II. UPDATE - June 12, 2008: The Des Moines Police Department refuses to release records that could shed light on whether Rafael Robinson committed the murder for which David Flores is serving life without parole. What are they hiding? UPDATE - June 17, 2008: It's official -- what the Des Moines Police Department has been hiding is exculpatory evidence they've kept away from David Flores since before Flores' trial. But will the court find a way to deny him a retrial? UPDATE - July 9, 2013: Granted a new trial in 2009 and released on bond in 2012, David Flores and the State of Iowa have reached a plea agreement that allows him to remain free, permanently. Unfortunately, his no contest plea means that shooting victim Phyllis Davis will never receive justice. |
Four years ago, Victor Caminata of Cadillac, Michigan was
convicted of arson and sentenced to 9 to 40 years in prison. The
evidence? Char marks in the basement and his girlfriend's
testimony that she had been about to break up with him. Attorneys
from the Michigan Innocence Project convinced both a judge and
assistant attorneys general that the real cause of the fire was the
cause originally determined by local firefighters: a faulty
chimney. |
A
three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived an
appeal
by George A. Souliotes, convicted of setting a 1997 fire that killed a
woman
and her two children, even though his lawyers missed a legal deadline
in
filing it. Souliotes' prosecution relied heavily
on
evidence that the fire was started with a flammable liquid and that its
residues
were found on Souliotes' shoes. A scientist years later showed that the
substance
on the shoes was different from what was found at the fire. That
evidence proves Souliotes is innocent.
UPDATE - April 26, 2012: On April 26, 2012, federal magistrate Michael Seng found that Mr. Souliotes made a sufficient showing of actual innocence and recommended that the district court now consider his underlying constitutional claims raised in his federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Those claims had previously been dismissed by the district court as having been untimely filed. It is now for the federal district court judge to decide whether to accept the findings and recommendations. If he does, the matter should proceed to a hearing on Mr. Souliotes's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, juror misconduct and actual innocence. UPDATE - July 3, 2013: Northern California Innocence Project client George Souliotes will soon be released from prison, after his attorneys from NCIP, Morrison & Foerster, LLP and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP successfully negotiated an agreement to secure his immediate freedom following 16 years of wrongful incarceration. Souliotes was wrongfully convicted of arson and triple murder in 2000 and sentenced to three life terms without parole. This agreement confirms his exoneration of arson and murder. |
Two decades after Chicago resident Daniel Taylor was
convicted of a double murder
in spite of evidence that he was in a police lockup when the slaying
took place, Cook County prosecutors have dropped all charges against
him, bringing to a close one of the city’s more controversial cases. For more than ten years, Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maurice Possley have followed Daniel's case, and, convinced of his innocence, advocated on his behalf. Click HERE for Steve Mills' 2012 story about Daniel. Click HERE for their landmark 2002 series, which included Daniel Taylor's case. UPDATE: January 10, 2014 -- The Cook County State's Attorneys has dismissed charges against Daniel's co-defendant, Deon Patrick, and he has been released from prison. |
After 8 years in prison for a rape another man committed,
Uriah Courtney was cleared by DNA and freed from a life sentence. |
After serving more than ten years in prison and being
required to
register as a sex offender, on June 7, 2013, Charles County Circuit
Court vacated MAIP client Jerry Lee Jenkins’ 1986 rape conviction and
dismissed the rape charges for which he had been convicted. DNA testing
proved not only that Mr. Jenkins was innocent of the crime, but also
that another man — a serial rapist in Virginia and Maryland — was the
real perpetrator. The assistant state’s attorney conceded Mr. Jenkins
did not commit this crime |
In 1984, a rape victim's mistaken identification of Robert Nelson as her assailant resulted in a prison sentence of 58 years. In 2012, DNA testing identified the rapist as Jerry Haley, and finally, in June, 2013, after another year in prison, Robert was freed and Jerry Haley was charged. |
Megan Winfrey
Mr. Winfrey, who was convicted of murder after three
bloodhounds allegedly matched
his scent to the victim, should be set free because the evidence
against
him was not legally sufficient, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
has ruled. The court acquitted Richard Winfrey Sr., reversing his
2007 conviction
in the murder of high school janitor Murray Burr in the small town of
Coldspring, about 60 miles north of Houston. Under the ruling,
prosecutors will not be allowed to retry the case.When her father was
acquitted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2010 (below), Megan
thought she would be released right away. But it took another 2
1/2 years to gain her freedom, and the Lonestar State continues to
stand tall against her bid for compensation.
Richard Winfrey Sr. |
Oshkosh,
WI detective Phil Charley can't remember who told him to destroy all
the DNA evidence in a rape case in which the defendant had already been
chosen. It was 1991, Joe Paulus was DA and his best friend, Vince
Biskupic, was Dep. DA. Another 13 years would pass before Paulus
went
to prison for taking bribes to fix cases, and Biskupic pretended not to
know him. Joseph Frey was bagged for the rape and sentenced to
102
years. Then a clerk found a scrap of bedsheet that Det. Charley
missed, one thing led to another, and not only was Frey cleared, but
the actual rapist (who died in 2008) was identified. UPDATE: July 12, 2013 -- All charges against Mr. Frey have been dismissed, and he is a free man. Unfortunately, he has no income, no place to live, and serious health problems. The maximum compensation available to him is $25,000, and it will take years for the state to weigh the merit of his application. For now, he has moved into a homeless shelter. |
Thanks to the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center, Andrew
Johnson has become the first person in Wyoming to get a new trial
because DNA excluded him as the man who raped a woman in 1989.
The victim's misidentification of Mr. Johnson is a classic
alcohol-addled identification; she had been drinking with him and other
friends earlier in the evening. It turns out that the man who
broke in several hours later and had sex with her was her fiance.
Prosecutors say they will retry Mr. Johnson. Our bet is they will
quiety fold their tents and dismiss the charges. UPDATE: July 20, 2013 - The State of Wyoming has dismissed all charges against Mr. Johnson; he will not be retried. The prosecutor, however, insists that does not mean Mr. Johnson is innocent. Apparently this is another case where the culprit raped the victim with another man's sperm. |
For over 40 years, Louis Taylor has languished in prison
for a hotel fire in Tucson, Arizona that was almost certainly an
accident. He went into prison at 16, and comes out at 59 -- but
only by pleading no contest to murder. |
Back
in 1990, police and prosecutors cooked up quite a murder charge against
David Boyce of Newport News. A little police perjury here, a
jailhouse
snitch ready to sell his mother for a deal there, a pinch of withheld
exculpatory evidence, and voila!
you've convicted an innocent man with no real evidence. It helps,
of course, that state judges, at all
levels,
acknowledged this mountain of evidence of egregious misconduct, but let
the conviction stand. At long, long last, it landed in the court
of
Judge James R. Spencer, who has ordered Mr. Boyce to be freed. UPDATE: September 17, 2013 -- All charges against David Boyce have been dismissed by Virginia Beach Commonwealth's Attorney Harvey L. Bryant, who determined there wasn't enough evidence to retry the case. UPDATE: May 30, 2014 -- David Boyce sues Newport News, VA, police for $25 Million. |
Wisconsin State
Journal Special Report: Burning Questions
by Dee J. Hall
After
Joey Awe’s Marquette County bar burned down in 2006, authorities
immediately suspected the gregarious, disabled Gulf War veteran of
arson.
|
In the wintry darkness in 1990 on a back street in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a jewelry thief fleeing a botched robbery
panicked and shot Hasidic Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger in
the head. The “Slain
Rabbi” was front-page tabloid news. Swaggering,
cigar-chewing Detective Louis Scarcella soon arrested
an unemployed printer named David Ranta.
Mr. Ranta was convicted in May 1991 and sentenced to 37.5 years in
maximum-security prison.
He is almost certainly not guilty. Now Brooklyn DA Charles
J. Hynes, after a lengthy investigation that uncovered some of the most
egregious police misconduct on record, is asking the courts to set Mr.
Ranta free. UPDATE: March 22, 2013 -- One day after being exonerated and released, Mr. Ranta suffered a heart attack. He has undergone cardiac stent catheterization, and is expected to recover. |
Nicole
Harris of Chicago, Illinois was 23 and a recent college graduate who
had just moved
back to Chicago with her family when she was convicted of murder in the
2005 death of her 4-year-old son Jaquari Dancy. But Harris has long
maintained that the confession that helped convict her was false and
that Jaquari died accidentally. Jaquari
was found in the family's Northwest Side home with an
elastic bedsheet cord wrapped around his neck. Her son Diante, then 5,
told
authorities at the time that he was alone with Jaquari when he saw him
wrap the cord around his neck while playing, but the trial judge barred
Diante from testifying. But
in the ruling overturning her guilty verdict, 7th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges
wrote that Diante's testimony "would have changed the entire tenor" of
Harris' case and supported her claims that Jaquari's death was
accidental and her confession false. UPDATE: June 17, 2013 - Nicole will not be retried. She is free, at last. |
For the better part of six years, Ronald Ross of
Oakland, California was confined to a cell at Solano State Prison for a
crime he never
committed. The victim of three false identifications that were
sparked by a sloppy
Oakland Police Department investigation, Ross was convicted on Nov. 8,
2006, of attempted murder and assault with a firearm in the shooting of
a West Oakland man. He was sentenced to prison for 25 years to
life, knowing he was
innocent, yet unable to prove he was the victim of a hasty
investigation and an ineffective defense. Now Ross will be freed
after law students
working for Santa Clara University Law School's Northern California
Innocence Project and attorneys from the San Francisco law firm Keker
& Van Nest uncovered multiple errors in Ross' case and enough
evidence to prove his innocence. |
A 58-year-old Texan, Randolph Arledge, walked free on February 11, 2013, after serving 29 years for a crime he didn't commit -- the repeated stabbing of a woman whose body was found on a dirt road in rural North Texas. Like many wrongfully convicted inmates, Arledge was sent to prison with the help of "snitch" testimony. Two co-conspirators in an armed robbery testified at his trial that he had admitted to stabbing someone in Corsicana and that he had blood on his clothes and knife, according to the filing by Arledge's attorneys. |
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office agreed on January
23, 2013 to
release William Lopez, who served 23 years in prison for murder, a week
after a
federal judge tossed out the man’s conviction, calling it “rotten from
Day 1.” After his release, Mr. Lopez crossed the
bar to the courtroom’s gallery, wearing a
prison jumpsuit, his only clothes, and hugged and kissed his wife. Down
the line he went, embracing the brother who looks like him, then the
lawyer who argued his case, and then the friend and advocate who was
released after serving time for a murder he did not commit and who gave
him hope. UPDATE: 9/20/14 - William Lopez died of complications of asthma. |
Early in 2012, Eric Glisson, locked up more than 15
years for murder,
wrote federal prosecutors in Manhattan telling them what he'd said all
along and what authorities hear from inmates all the time: that he was
wrongly convicted. He also named members of a violent drug
gang he suggested were the true killers. It was a shot in the dark. But
it turns out he may be right. Authorities and defense attorneys
say the letter has become a catalyst
for a possible reprieve for Glisson and four other people serving time
for the 1995 slaying of a cab driver in the Bronx – a homicide all say
they didn't commit. On October 18, 2012, authorities "temporarily" vacated their convictions and released them with ankle bracelets. If the DA's office finds evidence "absolving" them within 90 days, the convictions will be permanently vacated. When that happens, we will move their story to Recent Cases. UPDATE: December 13, 2012: It's official. Eric and Cathy have finally been released. Their wrongful convictions are what happen when the state relies on a crackhead who gets paid for his testimony. |
Jonathan
C. Montgomery went to prison solely on the word of a
teenager who claimed the former Hampton, Virginia resident sexually
assaulted her
when she was 10 years old. Alarms sounded from the courthouse to
the governor's office this month
when it was learned she lied. Of the questions raised by the tragic
case, one of the most serious is how Montgomery was found guilty beyond
a reasonable doubt. |
The Arizona State Clemency Board, the Arizona
Justice Project, and family members fought for his
release, alleging his wife, who worked for the Maricopa sheriff's
department, had the means and the motive to pin the homicides on him.
She has denied any wrongdoing. Macumber was allowed to plead no contest
in the 1962 killings to which someone else, who later died, had
confessed. |
In 2002, Drayton Witt of Maricopa County,
Arizona,
was found guilty of shaking his infant son to death. In
the intervening 12 years, doctors have learned that ongoing medical
problems like Steven’s can account for the retinal and subdural
bleeding they used to assume was caused by shaking, or by shaking and
blows to the head. More
importantly, the Medical Examiner who testified against him changed his
mind. The Arizona Court of Appeals has tossed Drayton's
conviction, and barred the state from retrying him. |
Lawrence Williams' exoneration was one in a string of
troubled cases handled by the office of Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, and the
first felony case dealt with by a special unit that Mr. Hynes set up a
year ago to root out miscarriages of justice. Ironically, when
Mr. Williams and his wife left the courthouse following his
exoneration, they went to a nearby park to eat sandwiches and watch
children play -- and were promptly issued a summons for being there
without a child. |
Michael Clancy, 38, of the Bronx, New York, spent more
than 10 years in prison for a murder
he says he did not commit. He is among the lucky few wrongfully
convicted individuals able to win their freedom, even though there was
no physical evidence such as DNA to prove his innocence. His attorney,
Ronald Kuby, said it was the open-mindedness of Bronx Supreme Court
Justice Denis Boyle (See Profile) and Bronx Assistant District Attorney
Gary Weil that brought Clancy's nightmare to an end. |
![]() John Grega leaves
court, almost free
|
In 1995, John
Grega was convicted of raping and killing his wife, Christine, while
the Long Island, NY couple and their 2-year-old son were vacationing in
Vermont the previous year. Mr. Grega was the first person in
Vermont history sentenced to life in prison without parole. His
conviction was recently vacated, and a new trial has been ordered,
because DNA belonging to another, unidentified man -- NOT Mr. Grega --
has been identified. The prosecutor still believes Vermont doesn't convict innocent people. Read what DNA expert Michael Spence, Ph.D., who reviewed the evidence, says the DNA proves. Then you decide: Did Vermont convict an innocent man? |
Andre Davis of Champaign County, Illinois was
convicted of raping and killing a 3-year-old girl. He had been
behind bars 31 years, 10 months and 29 days, the
longest any Illinois inmate has served before being exonerated by DNA
testing. Ironically, it was the victim's aunt who set his
exoneration in motion. Unfortunately, the prosecutor insists he
is guilty -- even though the semen recovered from the child's body
belonged to the state's witness. |
A false confession, with the details fed to him by police,
was all it took to send Damon Thibodeaux to Louisiana's death
row.
It's just that easy to convict -- and kill -- an innocent person.
Fifteen years later, thanks to the unusual cooperation between the
prosecution and defense investigators, the absence of DNA spared Damon a
lethal injection and released him to the arms of his family. |
John Edward Smith of Los Angeles, CA is poised to be
released from prison after serving 19 years for a murder he did not
commit. Smith’s exoneration was pursued by Innocence
Matters, a
Torrance, Calif., public interest law firm. Attorney Deirdre O’Connor,
who heads the group, said the sole witness whose testimony convicted
Smith recently admitted he had lied at the trial. The witness was the
shooting victim who survived. He said police told him to identify Smith
as the shooter. |
David Lee Wiggins of Ft. Worth, TX was convicted and
sentenced to life in prison
in 1989 the rape of a 14-year-old Fort Worth girl.
Although neither of the two fingerprints found at the scene
matched his, the girl, whose face was covered during most of the
attack, picked Wiggins out of a photo lineup and then a live lineup,
saying he looked familiar. But DNA testing earlier this month
excluded Wiggins as the person who
committed the crime. Tarrant County prosecutors said DNA evidence
demonstrated his innocence. |
Sedrick Courtney spent 16 years in prison knowing he did
not
commit the home invasion armed robbery and beating that put that put
him there. Faith kept him going. Now he is fully,
officially exonerated and free, after evidence that the Tulsa, Oklahoma
police said had been destroyed was found, and DNA tests cleared him. |
A Greensboro, NC man convicted of first-degree murder in 1995 was released from prison after a judge agreed with defense attorneys and a North Carolina assistant district attorney that he should be freed pending a new trial. LaMonte Armstrong’s hearing, originally scheduled for September, was fast-tracked after police uncovered new evidence during a retest of physical evidence from the crime scene. |
Frank O'Connell, who was convicted of murder in the Jan. 5, 1984 shooting death of 27-year-old Jay French of South Pasadena, California, has been freed and the charges against him dismissed. The Court cited recent witness recantations and improprieties in O'Connell's original murder trial. |
After spending 26 years in prison, David Gavitt is a free
man. Gavitt, now 53, was convicted in 1986 in the arson deaths of
his wife
and two daughters. He was serving three life sentences at Carson City
Correctional Facility when lawyers and law students from the Michigan
Innocence Clinic took on his case three years ago and filed a Motion
for Relief from Judgment in 2011. After extensive examination of
trial records and the evidence, Ionia
County Prosecutor Ron Schafer signed a stipulation and order,
acknowledging that Gavitt was entitled to a new trial, that the
prosecutor's office is not going to retry him, and that he should be
released from prison. Schafer said. “At
best, we have a fire that is undetermined (in origin and cause).” Chief
Circuit Court Judge Suzanne Hoseth-Kreeger ordered that
Gavitt's charges be dismissed, and he was released from prison. |
After a quarter-century in
prison
for setting a fire that killed a Chicago woman and her five children,
James Kluppelberg has been freed, as Cook County prosecutors
unexpectedly dropped the case against him. The
friend who implicated Kluppelberg has admitted he had lied because he
was facing his own criminal charges. Defense
attorneys also claimed prosecutors had failed to turn
over information about a woman who had set a fire a block from the
Lupercio home on the same night. That woman confessed to the other fire
and told police she was too drunk to remember if she had set the
Lupercio fire as well.
|
In 2003, Brian was a star football player at Long Beach (CA) Polytechnic High School, a top college football prospect with good chances of going into the NFL. Then Wanetta Gibson accused him of rape. He went to prison instead of college, and Wanetta's mother collected $1.5 million from the school district. After Brian was released from prison, Wanetta "friended" him on Facebook, and admitted she made up the charge. He has now been exonerated. |
A federal inmate who has served 11 years on drug charges
he says
he didn't commit has convinced prosecutors to let him out of
prison. Elroy Phillips refused to accept his fate
after being sentenced
to 30 years on charges of selling drugs to an undercover cop. He
conducted records searches, hired a private investigator, and dug up
information on the dirty cop who testified against him. Federal
prosecutors were finally convinced to dismiss charges against
him. |
After spending almost 18 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, Robert Dewey walks free. And the real murderer seems to have been identified. The DNA testing that helped exonerate Dewey also led prosecutors to Douglas Thames, whose profile matches that of the semen sample from the crime. Mr. Thames is currently in prison for the 1989 rape and murder of Susan Doll, in Fort Collins, Colo. Prosecutors intend to charge Thames for the Taylor crime. |
Jonathan Moore was convicted in 2002 of
the murder of Shawn Miller, 20,
of Montgomery, Illinois and the attempted murder of Leroy Starks, then
17. He
was scheduled to get out of prison 2057. But in April, 2011,
police detectives John Munn and Darryl Moore (no
relation) got a tip that the wrong man had been convicted, and new
witnesses came forward. The investigators pursued the leads and
their work led to Jonathan's exoneration. |
When Mike Hash was 15 years old, 74-year-old
Thelma B. Scroggins was murdered in her Lignum, VA home. In 2001,
despite any physical evidence connecting him to the crime, Mike was
convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without
parole. How did the State do it? By withholding evidence of
Mike's innocence and presenting witnesses the prosecutor knew were
lying.
U.S. District Judge James C. Turk has reversed Mike's conviction and
given the State 6 months to re-try or free him. UPDATE: On August 20, 2012, the charges against Mike Hash were dismissed. The Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney, who acted as special prosecutor since Mike's conviction was tossed, went out of his way to stress that this does not mean Mike is innocent. This appears to be an attempt to thwart or delay Mike receiving any compensation for his long imprisonment. |
In Dallas, TX in 1994, Richard Ray Miles was convicted of
murder and attempted murder. The only evidence against him was
the testimony of the sole eyewitness, who was coerced into identifying
him by both the investigating officer and the prosecutor. Centurion Ministries
uncovered the truth, which has set him free. |
In 1978, a student at William & Mary College in
Williamsburg, Virginia, was raped. She identified Bennett Barbour
as her assailant.
Barbour had a solid alibi; he did not match the suspect's description;
he was eliminated on the basis of simple blood type tests; he has
brittle bone disease; and he did not have a gun. He was convicted
solely on the basis of
the victim's identification. In 2010, he was cleared by DNA, but
Virginia authorities waited another 18 months to notify him. He's
dying, and hopes his name will be officially cleared before he passes
away. Related: Virginia officials limit access to DNA test results. Testing of DNA in hundreds of old rape and murder cases has excluded 76 convicts so far, but officials are only releasing results to prosecutors' offices -- many of whom take no further action. UDATE: May 25, 2012 - Bennett Barbour's Writ of Actual Innocence has been granted by the Virginia Supreme Court. |
UPDATE: 10/1/08 - In June, 2008, a federal appeals court agreed with the 2006 ruling of U.S. District Judge Kate O'Malley that D'Ambrosio is entitled to a new trial because prosecutors withheld several pieces of evidence that could have exonerated him. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason announced he will retry Joe in March, 2009. UPDATE: 1/23/12 - U.S. Supreme Court has refused to consider the state's appeal against Joe D'Ambrosio. The ruling wipes D'Ambrosio's legal slate clean. He is finally free. D'Ambrosio wants the prosecutors to be charged with attempted murder. He says the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office tried to kill him by withholding 10 pieces of evidence at his trial, evidence that could have led to a not-guilty verdict. Instead, D'Ambrosio sat on Ohio's death row for more than 20 years. |
Juan Smith, of New Orleans, LA, was convicted of killing
five people in 1995,
when a group of men burst into a house in search of money and drugs.
They ordered the occupants to lie down and opened fire. Mr. Smith
was the only person tried for the killings. He was convicted
based solely on the eyewitness testimony of a survivor, Larry Boatner.
Prosecutors presented no DNA, fingerprints, weapons or other physical
evidence. Mr. Boatner’s testimony proved sufficient, but it later
emerged that an hour after the shootings, and again five days later, he
was unable to identify any of
the gunmen. The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed Juan's conviction
-- with the predictable "Judas goat" dissent from Justice Clarence
Thomas. |
Ricky Dale Wyatt, wearing a sharp suit and yellow tie, walked out of the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, Tx on January 4, 2012 after 31 years in prison -- the longest stint served in Texas before having a conviction vacated, according to his lawyer. "Mr. Wyatt, it's been a long time, 31 years, but today is a good day for you," Judge John Creuzot said. |
At a hearing on January 3, 2012 that left prosecutors speechless, Delaware Superior Court Judge John A. Parkins overturned the conviction and death sentence against Jermaine Marlow Wright for the 1991 slaying of liquor store clerk Phillip Seifert. Judge Parkins said he knew that the decision was likely to cause the family of Mr. Seifer further anguish and frustration. "Nonetheless, the court stands as a guardian of the constitutional rights of every citizen, including those of the defendant," Parkins said, "and that is what this court has done today." |
Kerry Porter's conviction for the murder of Tyrone Camp in
Louisville, KY in 1994 rested on the tainted identification of an
eyewitness, the highly suspect claims of a jailhouse snitch, and the
tunnelvision of police investigators. Now police
and prosecutors are investigating whether they got the
wrong man and whether Porter has been locked away for a crime he didn’t
commit. UPDATE: 12/19/11 - After serving 14 years behind bars for a murder he insisted he didn’t commit, a stunned Kerry Porter learned that he was exonerated and hours later was released from prison. That came after Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Stengel agreed to clear Porter.“We have finally come to the conclusion that Kerry Porter did not commit the offense,” Stengel said at a news conference. |
DNA tests on evidence from the 1992 rape and murder of
11-year-old Holly
Staker in Waukegan, Illinois have excluded Juan Rivera, the man who
authorities
say confessed and is serving a life prison sentence for the
crime.
Rivera wept when he heard the news. UPDATE: May 8, 2009 - Juan was convicted of Holly Staker's rape and murder yet again, even though DNA excluded him. Prosecutors cited Juan's confession, which Juan says was coerced, as proof of his guilt. Rob Warden of the Center on Wrongful Convictions said: "We are committed absolutely to Juan Rivera. We believe in his innocence and we are going to do everything we can to bring justice in this case." UPDATE: November 25, 2011 - A decision by the Illinois Court of Appeals is expected any day in Juan Rivera's appeal of his 2009 conviction for the rape and murder of Holly Staker. Andrew Martin of the New York Times presents a comprehensive overview of the crimes (including those committed against Juan Rivera by police and prosecutors) and the insular legal community dubbed "The DNA Deniers." UPDATE: December 10, 2011 - The Illinois Court of Appeals has not only reversed Juan Rivera's conviction, it has barred prosecutors from trying him again. A stinging rebuke to prosecutors, justice after a quarter century for Juan Rivera. |
Another group of Chicago teenagers, forced to confess to
the murder of a prostitute in 1994, has been cleared by DNA and --
grudgingly -- released. Cook County DA Anita Alvarez, the
prosecutor who focuses state resources on maintaining convictions and
destroying those who dare present evidence of innocence -- vows to
re-try them. |
Even before the five Chicago teenagers went to prison, DNA
evidence
failed to link them to the 1991 rape and murder of a 14-year-old
Dixmoor girl. For the three who received the longest sentences, that
scientific evidence fueled a lengthy effort to prove their innocence
and obtain their freedom. That day came on November 3, 2011, some
seven months after new DNA tests connected
a convicted rapist to the crime and suggested the teens — in spite of
their confessions and, in two cases, guilty pleas — were innocent. |
A Dallas man who spent 14 years in prison for doggedly
refusing
to admit he sexually assaulted his stepdaughter was set free on
November 4, 2011 in
a case that had been unraveling since the victim recanted and former
prosecutors were accused of withholding evidence. State District
Judge Susan Hawk told Dale Lincoln Duke, 60, it was a
"privilege" to release him, triggering applause and a standing ovation
in a courtroom that included his parents. |
Henry James said it felt like a miracle when the New
Orleans Innocence Project lawyer called to
tell him a judge had vacated his 1982 rape conviction and ordered him
released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he was
serving a life sentence with no parole. He had been cleared by
DNA, and finding the evidence after 30 years was another miracle.
The worst part? James was excluded back in 1982 by rudimentary
bodily fluid testing, but his trial lawyer failed to tell jurors about
it. |
Michael Morton of Georgetown, TX was sentenced to life in
prison
for the murder of his wife, Christine, in August 1986. His attorneys
are teaming
up with the family of another murdered woman, Mildred McKinney, whose
case
remains unsolved, to file a federal lawsuit seeking DNA testing.
The
DA, of course, is opposing their efforts. UPDATE: September 29, 2011 -- After successfully fighting Michael Morton's efforts to obtain DNA testing, police are investigating a third unsolved murder in Williamson County. Has Morton been serving time for a serial killer? UPDATE: October 4, 2011 -- Michael Morton walked out of a Texas courthouse a free man after serving nearly 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. "I thank God this wasn't a capital case," he said. "That I only had life because it gave these saints here at the Innocence Projects time to do this." UPDATE: October 20, 2011 -- The former prosecutors who tried Michael Morton for murder in 1987 — District Judge Ken Anderson and Round Rock lawyer Mike Davis — didn't mind hiding exculpatory evidence or keeping a serial killer on the street to kill again. Getting a conviction was their only goal. Now that Morton has been cleared, after a quarter century in prison, Anderson and Davis don't want to answer questions under oath about what they did to him. Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies. |
Seventeen
years after he was set up by Los Angeles police and prosecutors and
convicted of a
murder he didn't commit, Obie Anthony is free. Attorneys from the
Northern California Innocence Project brought a state habeas petition,
which was granted on the basis of the cumulative harm done by egregious
prosecutorial misconduct. And while Mr. Anthony sat in prison,
the real killer got away with murder. |
The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission has
decided
unanimously that a three-judge panel should review the cases of Kenneth
Kagonyera
and Robert Wilcoxson. Both pled guilty to 2nd degree murder
in the death of Walter Bowman of Fairview, NC, even though both
maintained
their innocence before and after their pleas. DNA results have
excluded
both men. Worse, convenience store surveillance tape that would
have supported their alibis was taped over with footage from a soap
opera while
in the sheriff's department custody. UPDATE: September 22, 2011 - Kenneth Kagonyera and Robert Wilcoxson walked free when a panel of judges ruled they didn't kill a man during a home invasion despite their guilty pleas a decade earlier. They pled to avoid the death penalty. |
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DNA testing has freed another wrongly convicted man in
Dallas County, Texas. State District Judge Don Adams ordered that
Johnny
Pinchback be released after the district attorney’s office and the
Innocence Project of Texas said DNA testing proves he is
innocent. Pinchback, 55, pleaded not guilty in 1984 but was
convicted by a jury
in the sexual assault of two teenage girls and sentenced 99 years in
prison. |
In 1995, Debra Brown of Logan, UT, was convicted of
murdering her good friend and boss, Lael Brown. It was a
circumstantial case, mostly smoke and mirrors, and investigators and
prosecutors concealed the fact there were other, better suspects.
With the involvement of the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project, Debra at
last has real hope of proving her innocence. UPDATE: May 2, 2011 - Judge Michael DiReda ruled: "The court now determines by clear and convincing evidence that (Debra Brown) did not engage in the conduct for which she was convicted and is, therefore, factually innocent of the aggravated murder of Lael Brown,." UPDATE: July 12, 2013 - The Utah Supreme Court has upheld Judge DiReda's ruling. Debra Brown will remain free and is entitled to compensation for her wrongful imprisonment. |
The Innocence Project of Florida says new
DNA evidence on a key piece of evidence -- a gray shirt
-- proves Derrick Williams was wrongfully convicted of a rape in
Palmetto in
1993. The case against him was based on eyewitness identification
by the victim, which is wrong in 50% of such cases. But
prosecutors are hanging on, still trying to block exoneration efforts. UPDATE: April 4, 2011 - Derrick Williams has been released from prison. State Attorney Earl Moreland says he will not retry him, although he still believes Derrick is guilty. ("I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.") |
In 1992, Glenn Tinney of Mansfield, Ohio confessed to the
county prosecutor that he had killed local store owner Ted White in
1988. But reinvestigating in 2009, Mansfield police concluded
Tinney is innocent. They asked the Ohio Innocence Project to
assist, and on March 25, 2011, Tinney was allowed to withdraw his
guilty plea. |
After 20 years in prison, Franky Carillo of Los Angeles, CA has been exonerated and released from prison. The six witnesses who testified that he was the killer of Donald Sarpy, including the victim's son, have recanted. All six have now admitted that they did not really see anything, and were influenced to make their identifications of Carrillo. In addition, two other men have confessed to the shooting, defense investigators said, and admitted that Carrillo was not involved. |
After serving 20 years of a 35-year sentence for
kidnapping, rape and robbery, Alvin Jardine, III of Maui became the
first Hawaiian freed through the efforts of the Hawai'i Innocence
Project. Maintaining his innocence through three trials -- the
first two with hung juries -- Mr. Jardine denied himself early parole
because he refused to participate in a sex offender program that
required him to admit guilt. DNA proved what he said all along:
he is innocent. |
For 25 years, Thomas Haynesworth of Richmond, VA said he
was not the man who raped a church day-care worker at knifepoint.
"Nobody ever listened to me," he complained.
They're listening now. Thanks to the late Mary Jane Burton,
a crime lab worker who kept small samples of DNA evidence in the files
she worked on, Thomas has been excluded as the assailant, and the real
rapist has been identified. The foregoing news account was published on March 19, 2009. As of February 2, 2011, Thomas Haynesworth was still in prison. DNA proved him innocent of most of the rapes he was convicted of committing, and even one of which he was acquitted. But there were two rapes with no physical evidence, nothing to test. Finally, freedom is in sight. UPDATE: March 18, 2011 - The Parole Board has voted to release Thomas Haynesworth on parole. His actual innocence petition is still pending before the Virginia Court of Appeals. UPDATE: December 6, 2011 - The Virginia Court of Appeals has issued a Writ of Actual Innocence, officially exonerating Thomas Haynesworth. |
In Zion, IL, on Mother's Day in 2005, 8-year-old Laura
Hobbs and her friend, 9-year-old Krystal Tobias,
disappeared while bike riding. After searching all night, Jerry
found them, stabbed to death. There followed a marathon, 48-hour
police interrogation, after which it was announced that Jerry had
confessed. It was a classic, coerced, false confession, but the
media went with it. Nancy Grace called him "a monster."
When the physical evidence -- DNA -- proved him innocent, the state
took another 2 1/2 years to set him free and look for serial killer
Jorge Torrez. |
To the cheers of family and friends, Caramad Conley took his first steps as a free man outside San Francisco County Jail on January 12, 2011, after serving 18 years for a double-murder conviction that a judge ruled had been arrived at through perjured testimony. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Marla Miller ruled that San Francisco police and prosecutors had failed to reveal to Conley's defense team before his 1994 trial that the city had paid thousands of dollars and provided the use of a house to the star prosecution witness, police informant Clifford Polk. |
Angela Hackl was found in the woods outside Sauk City, WI in 1987. She had been shot and hanged by the neck from a tree branch with a chain, and a pile of brush was arranged beneath her body in a makeshift pyre. A jury convicted Terry Vollbrecht, now 49, of killing Hackl in 1989. But on January 10, 2011, Dodge County Circuit Judge Steven Bauer agreed the evidence could create doubt in jurors’ minds about Vollbrecht’s guilt and ordered a new trial. |
A Texas man declared innocent on January 4, 2011 after 30
years in prison
had at least two chances to make parole and be set free — if only he
would admit he was a sex offender. But Cornelius Dupree Jr. refused to
do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery,
in the process serving more time for a crime he didn't commit than any
other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence. |
Virginia LeFever, 59, of Newark, Ohio, who
spent more than
20 years in prison for a murder she says she
didn't commit was released after her conviction was overturned
because a key prosecution witness admitted lying. She was
sentenced to life in prison in 1990 on an aggravated murder charge,
accused of killing her husband with poison. Ms. LeFever has long
maintained that William LeFever's 1988 death was a suicide
by drug overdose, brought on by the couple's impending divorce. The
witness, James L. Ferguson, 64, a longtime Franklin County
toxicologist, was sentenced to 30 days in jail for falsification
earlier this summer. He had served as an expert witness during hundreds
of trials while serving with the Franklin County coroner's office. UPDATE: April 21, 2011 - Virginia LeFever will not be retried. |
Bobby Ray Dixon, 53, of Hattiesburg, MS died of lung
cancer on November 10, 2010. He, Larry Ruffin and Phillip Bivens
had been convicted of the 1979 rape and murder of Eva
Gail Patterson. DNA tests conducted earlier in 2010 cleared all
three men, and implicated a convicted rapist, Andrew Harris.
Larry Ruffin died in 2002. |
Justice was on trial last week in a small town in
northwest
Missouri. For three days, a circuit judge was shown what happens
when
police officers give inaccurate testimony, prosecutors distort facts
and
a defense lawyer doesn't do his job. The case concerned Dale
Helmig,
who is serving a life sentence without parole for the murder of his
mother,
Norma Helmig. Her body, weighted with a cinder block, was found in the
flooded
Osage River between Jefferson City and Linn on Aug. 1, 1993.
The lead prosecutor then was Kenny Hulshof of Columbia, who later
became
a U.S. representative and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2008. When
Gov.
Jay Nixon was state attorney general, Hulshof was Nixon's special
prosecutor.
Hulshof would go around the state helping local prosecuting attorneys
with
difficult murder cases. He often got convictions. Since then, some have
turned
out to be tainted and were overturned. Helmig's may be next. UPDATE: Nov 4, 2010 -- Dale Helmig wept as his attorney read him a judge's order reversing his conviction for the murder of his mother in 1993. |
Students at
the Texas Innocence Network have uncovered new evidence, never
presented at trial, that death row inmate Anthony Graves was not
involved in the 1992 slaying of six people. The
students believe Graves would be acquitted if he were retried.
But this is Texas, the state has what it wants -- a conviction -- and
despite grave prosecutorial misconduct, U. S. Magistrate Judge John
Froeschner thinks Anthony should keep his appointment with the
executioner. UPDATE: Anthony Graves' conviction and death sentence were vacated by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court in its decision accused Burleson County prosecutors of misconduct, including failure to disclose statements that could have helped Graves' defense. His retrial has not yet been scheduled, but when it occurs, Joan E. Scroggins a Burleson County assistant district attorney, will not be on the case. The state court trial judge has ordered her recused. Prosecutor Off Case. UPDATE: On October 29, 2010, capital murder charges against Anthony Graves were dropped. He spent 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Diane Jennings of the Dallas Morning News reported on November 1, 2010: "A provocative idea is being batted around in the wake of the release of Anthony Graves from Death Row after a special prosecutor declared he was an innocent man, found guilty due to prosecutorial misconduct. The statute of limitations on prosecutorial misconduct has expired but according to the Bryan Eagle, some defense attorneys are suggesting the prosecutor be charged with attempted murder." |
Matthew Norwood of HInds County, Mississippi spent more
than a dozen years behind bars for a carjacking he did not
commit. On October 7, 2010, the 30-year-old man clutched the
order issued by Hinds
County Circuit Judge Winston Kidd tossing out Norwood's 1995
conviction. "This is what I was looking for," said Norwood, who
has been free since
2007 but not clear. "It's a blessing from God. In that prison, anything
can happen." |
Police in Richardson, Texas put a lot of effort into coercing a rape confession from deaf teenager Stephen Brodie back in 1990. Maybe that's why they continue to insist they had the right guy, even though the physical evidence tied the crime -- and 15 other rapes in the area -- to Robert Waterfield. Brodie spent 10 years in prison for the crime. He brought a petition to establish his innocence, based on Waterfield's fingerprint on the window of the victim's bedroom. Stephen Brodie was exonerated and freed on September 29, 2010. |
A judge in Hattiesburg, Mississippi on September 16, 2010
freed Bobby Ray Dixon and Phillip Bivens, who spent three decades in
prison before DNA evidence showed they didn't rape a woman and cut her
throat in a grisly 1979 attack. Larry Ruffin, who died in prison
in 2002, has also been cleared. |
Although
a jury convicted Malenne Joseph of Orlando, Florida of criminal
mischief (property damage) in June of 2010, the case against her has
unraveled. It turns out that Malenne had absolutely no connection
to the crime or the victim, ever. Authorities are now
investigating the circumstances that led to her arrest in the first
place. |
After almost 15 years in prison for another man's crime,
Cody has finally been released -- at least, until the Brown County DA
(Green Bay) can figure out some way to sandbag him again. His
conviction was overturned by the state court of appeals "in the
interest of justice." County investigators used every improper
inducement to get the victim of a robbery and stabbing -- who had a
.22% BAC at the time -- to pick Cody out of a photo line up. If
he is retried, it will be interesting to see what they can possibly use
as evidence a second time around. UPDATE: On January 12, 2011, the state supreme court declined the state's petition to review the reversal of Cody's conviction. Brown County DA John Zakowski, predictably, says he'll soldier on and retry Cody -- damn the cost and the indecency of his actions. |
Koua Fong Lee, serving eight years for
vehicular homicide because of a fatal
crash involving his Toyota Camry, is hoping for exoneration amid
concerns over unintended acceleration in some of Toyota's
vehicles. He has always maintained his innocence
in the 2006 crash, which killed Javis Adams, 33, his
10-year-old son, Javis Adams
Jr., and 6-year-old Devyn Bolton. Mr. Lee is not
the first innocent person convicted of murder due to a defective
auto. Sheila
Bryan was convicted of killing her mother (and later cleared)
because the defective ignition switch in her Ford caused a fatal
fire. UPDATE: On August 6, 2010, Koua Fong Lee's conviction was vacated and he was released from prison. The prosecuting attorney has decided not to retry him. |
On July 30, 2010, it took a jury 20 minutes to decide
Belmond Klemme, Iowa teacher Jodi Lynn Barrus' fate. She was
found not guilty of engaging in a pattern, practice or scheme of sexual
exploitation of an 18-year-old male student. The teen had a
history of making up stories. |
A Houston man who's spent the last 27 years imprisoned for
a
rape he didn't commit got one step closer to freedom on July 30,
210. During a court hearing, a judge granted Michael Anthony
Green a personal bond that will let him walk out of jail. Green's
pending release was made possible after the Harris County
District Attorney's Office reopened his case and new DNA tests it
commissioned showed he did not commit a 1983 rape of a woman who had
been abducted. |
Allen Porter, of Houston, Texas, was sentenced to life in prison for a June 18, 1990, rape and robbery in southwest Houston. He was identified as one of three men who kicked their way into a drug dealer's residence in search of money and drugs. They terrorized the apartment's four occupants, repeatedly raping two women. Allen's nephew, Jimmy Hatton, and Perry Harrison told state District Judge Joan Campbell they committed the crime along with a third man. They said Porter was not at the crime scene. |
Seventeen years ago, Alan G. Northrop and Larry W. Davis were led from a Clark County, Washington courtroom in shackles, convicted of brutally attacking and raping a woman in La Center. On July 14, 2010, they walked out of the courtroom free men, smiling and hugging family members after a judge dismissed their charges, citing new DNA evidence showing they weren't at the scene and pointing to different assailants. |
On July 6, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Charles P. Ginn ordered the release from Avery-Mitchell Correctional Center of Jonathan Scott Pierpoint, who served 17 years of a life sentence for a crime he did not commit. Ginn's order overturned Pierpoint's 1992 conviction for first-degree sexual offense and dismissed the charges against him. Faculty and students in Duke Law School's Wrongful Convictions Clinic and its Innocence Project worked for two years to develop their claim that Pierpoint's conviction was the result of false testimony. |
It took 26 years for Douglas Pacyon to clear his name
after
being convicted of a 1984 rape and serving almost seven years in prison
for an attack he didn't commit. And then it took all of three
minutes on June 21, 2010 for the criminal-justice system to officially
exonerate him. |
In vacating a murder conviction and barring prosecutors from retrying the case, a federal judge in New York has lashed out at the Brooklyn district attorney's Office for failing to take responsibility for its prosecutors' alleged misconduct. At a contentious, 90-minute habeas corpus hearing on June 8, 2010, Eastern District Judge Dora L. Irizarry noted that petitioner Jabbar Collins, a renowned jailhouse attorney, had uncovered numerous documents while serving his 34-years-to-life sentence suggesting that prosecutors had withheld evidence, coerced witnesses and lied to the court and the jury. |
William Avery, convicted in the 1998 strangulation of a
Milwaukee
prostitute has been released from custody after tests
of DNA evidence linked another man to the killing, Milwaukee County
District Attorney John Chisholm said. Mary Johnson, the mother of
victim Maryetta Griffin, said authorities
told her the DNA sample matches the profile of accused serial killer
Walter E. Ellis. Mr. Avery's conviction was based on jailhouse
"snitch" testimony. He had been sentenced to 40 years in prison. |
Tyrone Jones walked out into the hazy sunshine on the
morning of May 25, 2010
and let out a deep breath on the steps of the Baltimore City Circuit
Courthouse, his shoulders light for the first time in a dozen
years. He had come to court prepared for trial on charges of
conspiring to
commit murder, only to be told he wouldn't be prosecuted. The case was
dropped. "It took all but 10 seconds to undo something that's
been going on for 12 years," Jones said, still shocked. |
A Charlotte, NC man wrongfully convicted of kidnapping and
armed robbery is finally home after spending 12 years behind
bars. Shawn Massey, 37, was the victim of erroneous eyewitness
identification, say researchers from Duke Law School, whose Wrongful
Convictions Clinic and Innocence Project spent more than four years
examining the case. |
A
Los Angeles man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in
prison for a 1994 murder and attempted robbery in South Los Angeles is
a free man today. There was nothing simple about his
exoneration. First, he was identified as the shooter by the real
killer, even though absolutely no other evidence connected him to the
crime. Then he was attacked in prison and killed another inmate
in self-defense. After he was exonerated of the 1994 charge and
resolved the prison attack charge, prison officials framed him up on a
false charge of possessing a razor blade. DNA cleared him of
that, and he was supposed to be released on April 6, 2010, but the
prison refused to let him go, saying "protestors" were gathered at the
bus station. Those were his family, waiting to greet him.
Finally, a judge ordered that
Reggie be released, and he was welcomed home by his family on May 16,
2010. |
New lab tests show that DNA recovered from the
semen-stained
underwear of a 12-year-old rape victim couldn't have come from the man
who has served more than 27 years in prison for the crime.
Raymond Towler has maintained his innocence for nearly three decades,
insisting he wasn't the man who abducted two young children from a
Cleveland park on May 24, 1981.
His lawyers with the Ohio Innocence Project say the results prove
Towler's innocence. UPDATE: On May 5, 2010, a beaming Raymond Towler was fold by Judge Eileen Gallagher: "Mr. Towler, you are free to go." |
Rochester, NY makes the news twice in one week, when the NY Court of Appeals threw out Mr. Richardson's conviction. The trial judge should have caught this, but instead put his seal of approval on a coerced Alford plea by Rashjeem Richardson and sent him to prison for a knife attack someone else committed. Rochester prosecutors said four witnesses identified Mr. Richardson, when only one did so, and she retracted the next day because she had been drunk when she fingered him. When faced with a choice between a conviction and truth, prosecutors in Rochester choose a conviction. |
A former Rochester, NY truck driver who spent nearly 19
years behind bars for
a 1988 slaying he didn't commit walked free April 28, 2010 after DNA
testing
exonerated him and instead pointed to a man who strangled a 4-year-old
girl in 1994. This is yet another case in which police coerced a
false confession from an innocent man. They got a conviction, but
they allowed the killer to kill again. |
The Innocence Project Northwest is seeking — on the basis
of DNA
testing unavailable at the time of the crime — a new trial for two
Orchards-area men convicted in 1993 of attacking a woman in La
Center. “New evidence has proven what the
defendants have maintained for 17
years,” said John Pantazis, staff attorney for the Innocence Project
Northwest Clinic in Seattle. “They are completely innocent.” UPDATE: On April 21, 2010, Clark County Superior Court Judge Diane Woolard vacated the sentences of Alan G. Northrop and Larry W. Davis. |
Two Connecticut men imprisoned for 16 years in a murder that a judge says they did not commit were ordered freed on Thursday. Rockville Superior Court Judge Stanley Fuger said in a ruling that the two men were victims of "manifest injustice" when they were convicted of the 1993 killing of a New Haven store owner. The star witness against them has since recanted, and a private investigator hired by state public defenders concluded the men's DNA was not found on a cord used to tie the victim's hands. |
In
2008, Waynesville, NC resident Donald “Pete” McCracken Jr., 40,
was indicted on a charge of first-degree rape — a B1 felony that, at
the time, carried a minimum sentence of 16 years in prison, with a
maximum sentence of up to life without parole. Almost
14 months later, the alleged victim recanted the accusation and
the charge against McCracken was dismissed. He was declared innocent.
But it cost him more than $100,000 and a “year of hell” to clear his
name. Still, he fears his reputation may be tainted beyond repair. |
He had proclaimed his innocence, to no avail, at his trial
and sentencing and in his five years behind bars. And when he was
released from prison, Freddie Peacock, a churchgoing
Rochester, N.Y., man with severe mental illness, persisted in what
would become the defining mission of his difficult life: convince the
world that he was not, in fact, guilty of rape. At last, 28 years
later, DNA has shown what Freddie said was true: he is innocent. |
In
1998, 17-year-old Jarrett Adams, an African American from the
South Side of Chicago, was falsely accused and ultimately wrongfully
convicted of raping a white woman. He spent 8 years in prison
before
he was exonerated in 2007 with the help of the Wisconsin Innocence
Project. Since his release, Jarrett has gone back to
college and
ultimately plans to attend law school so that he can become a criminal
defense attorney. On December 23, 2009, Jarrett was inexplicably denied
compensation for his wrongful conviction. (A YouTube documentary
by John Maki.) |
On Thursday, January 14, 2010, Michael Tillman walked out of the Cook County Courthouse and headed straight for Mac Arthur's Restaurant, a soul food institution on Chicago's West Side. After 23 years of being wrongfully incarcerated and facing a life behind bars, the barbeque ribs tasted particularly sweet. "If it weren't for the publicity that was brought to the case in the early stages, being only a couple of years ago, by AlterNet… he might still be in prison now," Flint Taylor founding partner of the People's Law Office and co-counsel in Tillman's case, told AlterNet. |
The State of Oregon's case against Scott Cannon for the
execution-style murders of three people in 1998 rested on
now-discredited bullet lead analysis and the testimony of the
victims' landlady, who told police Scott was the last person at
the residence and the only one who could have committed the
murders. The landlady has been implicated in the killing of her
husband and the murder of her boyfriend, and is serving a prison
sentence in the latter shooting death. UPDATE: 8/14/09--Salem, Oregon prosecutors have decided not to try to defend bullet lead analysis in Scott Cannon's case. They have stipulated to reversal of his conviction. Scott Cannon to get a retrial. UPDATE: 12/18/09--Prosecutors have dropped all charges against Scott Cannon, admitting that the State destroyed the evidence in the case. Note: The State does not say what this evidence was, since the little there was in the first place has been discredited, and a reasonable person must suspect the authorities are lying to save face. Meanwhile, Scott Cannon is Free. |
Within days of one
another, two innocent men who served, between them, 63 years in prison
for crimes they did not commit, were exonerated by DNA and
released. Mistaken eyewitness identification led to Jimmy's arrest and conviction in Lake Wales, Florida for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a young boy in 1974. Junk forensic science put Donald Gates in prison for the 1981 rape and murder of a Georgetown University co-ed in Washington, DC: an FBI lab analyst testified that hairs on the victim were Donald's. DNA says the hairs belong to someone else. |
from the Austin Chronicle Robert Springsteen: Somebody Has to Die UPDATE Robert Springsteen's Conviction Overturned Co-defendant Michael Scott's conviction likely to fall on the same grounds UPDATE - 2/27/07 The
US Supreme Court refused to hear the state's appeal and affirmed
reversal of Springsteen's conviction. Re-trial expected before
the
end of 2007.
UPDATE -
6/6/07
Michael Scott's Conviction Falls Same grounds, same
5-4 majority as in Springsteen's appeal decision.
UPDATE: 4/18/08 New DNA Evidence Excludes All Four Defendants UPDATE: 6/24/09 Judge orders Springsteen and Scott released. UPDATE: 10/28/09 Travis
County prosecutors moved to dismiss the murder indictments against
Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, the two remaining defendants in
1991
yogurt shop murders after announcing in court today that they are still
looking
for the person whose DNA was found last year in one of the four teenage
victims.
Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said, "I believe it
is
the best legal and strategic course to take and is the one that leaves
us
in the best possible posture to ultimately retry both Springsteen and
Scott.”
Never try to confuse her with scientific facts.
|
A deeply apologetic judge officially has dropped all
charges against an innocent man he sent to prison for rape. "I
want to convey to you my personal regret in having participated,
though unknowingly, in the injustice committed to you," Manhattan
Criminal Court Judge Richard Carruthers told William McCaffrey, calling
the wrong conviction "a catastrophe both for [McCaffrey] and for the
criminal justice system." McCaffrey's accuser, Biurny Peguero,
27, took back her damning rape allegations in August, 2009 and
confessed to perjury. |
The Utah state prison gates opened for Harry Miller in 2007, but he continues to fight to clear his name of the aggravated robbery conviction that put him in prison in the first place. It was a crime he was accused of committing in Salt Lake City less than two weeks after he had a stroke in Louisiana. A recent decision by the Utah Court of Appeals may afford Miller the justice he believes has long eluded him. |
UPDATE: 9/21/08
-- Murder victim's mother meets with Lebrew Jones. "They've got the
wrong man." UPDATE: 11/20/11 -- Two years after being released on parole, his innocence claim forgotten by the State of New York, Lebrew Jones struggles to live in a Prison Without Bars. |
Fernando has been in New York's infamous Sing Sing Prison
since 1992, convicted in the fatal shooting of a teenager following a
dispute on Union Square in New York City. There was no
forensic evidence, no fingerprints, no motive, no blood or DNA evidence
linking Fernando to the crime. He had a solid alibi and didn't
know any of the people involved in the dispute. His conviction
rests on his identification by six eyewitnesses, four of whom viewed
mugshots together and picked out Fernando by consensus. UPDATE: 11/13/09 -- Friday the 13th was a lucky day for Fernando Bermudez. After 18 years in prison, he was found innocent of a murder he always said he did not commit. “I find no credible evidence connects Fernando Bermudez to the homicide of Mr. Blount,” Justice John Cataldo of New York State Supreme Court wrote. “All of the people’s trial evidence has been discredited: the false testimony of Efraim Lopez and the recanted identifications of strangers. I find, by clear and convincing evidence, that Fernando Bermudez has demonstrated he is innocent of this crime.” Found Actually Innocent. |
Forest
Shomberg, 41, is serving a 12-year prison term for a sexual assault in
Madison, WI,
a crime for which he has always professed innocence. At the heart of
his appeal
is the argument that the trial judge erred in disallowing testimony
from an
expert witness knowledgeable in the area of eyewitness
identifications. The
victim agreed at trial with statements that she picked
Shomberg because he was "the best of the six," even though "he
very well could have not been the guy." His fate now rests in the
hands of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. UPDATE: The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Shomberg's conviction. UPDATE: 11/13/09 -- Friday the 13th was the luckiest day Forest Shomberg has had in a long time. Judge Patrick Fiedler cited new DNA evidence and newly developed scientific research on faulty eyewitness identification in overturning his own judgment of conviction in the 2002 case. Shomberg left the courthouse a Free Man. UPDATE: 11/10/11 -- Two days short of two years after Forest Shomberg was exonerated and abandoned by the State of Wisconsin, he was sentenced in federal court for possessing a gun that he bought to commit suicide. But this may be his best hope yet, since Judge Barbara Crabb structured his sentence to meet his treatment needs. A heck of a way to get help. UPDATE: 8/16/13 -- Forest lost his fight against depression and hopelessness. |
In overturning Rafael Madrigal's conviction for a 2000
drive-by shooting in
East Los Angeles, CA, a federal judge highlighted evidence indicating
that
Madrigal was innocent of the crime, and faulted Madrigal's defense
attorney for failing to effectively assist him. He was reportedly
working at a Rancho Cucamonga factory at the time of
the shooting, but his attorney failed to call enough witnesses during
his trial to prove the alibi, the judge wrote. While he was in
prison, Rafael's father died and the family's home was
foreclosed. Donors in the Ontario, CA area have donated $4,500 so
the family can rent a home and pay moving expenses. The Los
Angeles DA is still deciding whether to re-try him. |
A 36-year-old Detroit, MI man, Dwayne Provience, jailed
for the past eight years for a
murder he says he did not commit, has been granted a new trial by a
Wayne Circuit Court judge.
Dwayne Provience has been in prison since 2001, despite his consistent
claims of innocence. Judge Timothy Kenny ordered a new trial, citing
the prosecution's use of a less-than-credible witness. Link: A John Maki
youtube Documentary:
No DNA to Test: The Wrongful Conviction of Dwayne Provience |
Several times over the 26 years he spent in prison for the
1977 murder
of a 92-year-old woman, Dewey Bozella of Poughkeepsie, NY was dealt a
potential
get-out-of-jail card. In multiple plea-bargain
offers during his trial in 1990 and in four
subsequent parole hearings, confessing and expressing remorse for the
crime could have given him a chance to go free. He did not bite. “I
could never admit to something I didn’t do,” said Mr. Bozella, 18 at
the time of the crime, 50 now. “I realized that if I was going to die
in prison because of saying I’m innocent, well that was what was going
to happen.” He said these things on October 28, 2009, outside the
Dutchess
County Courthouse, rain cascading down, finally a free man after a
judge threw out his conviction. |
Claude Alvin Simmons Jr., 54, and Christopher Shun Scott,
39,
were each sentenced to life in prison for the April 7, 1997, shooting
death of Alfonso Aguilar during a home-invasion robbery in Dallas, TX.
Their
convictions were based primarily on the eyewitness testimony of
Aguilar's wife, Celia Escobedo, who was present in their Love Field
area home when the killing occurred. That identification was
mistaken, said Mike Ware, head of the Dallas County District Attorney's
Conviction Integrity Unit. They are the latest DNA exonerees in
the Dallas DA's review of suspect cases. |
For 16 years, Edwin Chandler
faithfully believed the day would
come when everyone would know he wasn't the man who shot Brenda
Whitfield in the head during a 1993 robbery at the Chevron station
where she worked. That day finally arrived on October 13, 2009,
when Jefferson Circuit (Kentucky) Judge Fred
Cowan vacated the manslaughter and robbery charges against Chandler
after prosecutors and police announced they had convicted the wrong man. |
September 2, 2009 was
a big day for three men -- 2 in North Carolina, 1 in Florida -- who
have spent, among them, 55 years in prison for crimes they did not
commit. Laboratory testing has shown that a Broward, Florida man locked up since he was 15 for the rape and murder of a Miramar woman in 1983 is not the source of the DNA found on the victim's body. Anthony Caravella, now 41, has spent 25 years, or more than half his life, in prison. A 49-year-old man who has served more than 14 years of a life sentence for raping two teenage sisters was released after DNA tests determined that he wasn't the attacker. Joseph Lamont Abbitt of Winston-Salem was convicted on June 22, 1995, of two counts of first-degree rape, one count of first-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree kidnapping in connection with the 1991 sexual assaults of a 15-year-old girl and her 13-year-old sister. A pioneering state commission was Gregory Taylor's only hope at a chance of dying a free man. The eight members of the commission delivered that chance on Friday, voting unanimously that they believed there was sufficient evidence that Taylor was innocent of murdering a prostitute in 1991. They referred his case to a three-judge panel for further review. UPDATE: On February 17, 2010, Gregory Taylor made history. He was found innocent by a panel of three judges appointed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. The judges gave Greg Taylor his life back. |
It was 1993 when Dorka Lisker was murdered in her home in
Sherman Oaks, CA. Her 17-year-old son, Bruce,
was
charged with the murder. He had a drug problem and a history of
fighting with his mother. Phillip
Rabichow, then a deputy district attorney, convinced a jury that
Bruce was guilty. As the years rolled by and Lisker reached middle age
in prison, Rabichow rarely gave the case a second thought. But in 2005,
new information had shaken his faith in the
fairness of the verdict: A bloody footprint found at the scene did not
match Lisker's shoes. A mysterious phone call made around the time of
the murder raised further questions. UPDATE: August 18, 2005 - FBI confirms shoe print at scene not Lisker's. UPDATE: August 8, 2009 - Judge overturns Bruce Lisker's conviction in 1983 killing of his mother UPDATE: August 22, 2009 - D.A. to retry Lisker in mother's 1983 slaying UPDATE: September 21, 2009: The D.A. has decided not to retry Bruce. Of course, the DA remains "confident in Mr. Lisker's original conviction," because they may not always be right, but they are never wrong. |
When William Richards came home from work in High Desert,
CA and found his wife, Pamela, bludgeoned to death with a cinder block
on their front lawn, he instantly became the only suspect. The
local authorities had to work hard to obtain a conviction,
though. It took three trials -- the first two ended with hung
juries -- and false evidence manufactured by a county crime lab analyst
to make William appear guilty. Now DNA from under Pamela's
fingernails excludes William, and DNA on the murder weapon shows
someone else was holding it. The DA, of course, just doesn't see
William being exonerated. UPDATE: August 13, 2009 - California Superior Court Judge Brian McCarville has granted a Writ of Habeas Corpus filed by the California Innocence Project on behalf of William Joseph Richards. "The court finds due to the bitemark, DNA and hair evidence that the People's case was undermined and points unerringly to innocence," Judge McCarville wrote. Will the DA prosecute Richards a fourth time? |
When Perry Bai was found stabbed to death in his Perry
Township, Ohio home, police pursued a classic investigation. They
decided Bai's former roommate, Joseph Grossi, walked 17 miles to Bai's
home and killed him. Grossi, who suffers from bipolar disorder
and schizophrenia, was brought in for questioning, denied his
medications and after hours of intense interrogation, he
confessed. Stark County Common Pleas Judge
Charles E. Brown Jr. found their methods were just hunky-dory and the
confession could be used against Grossi at trial. But the crime
lab found evidence implicating others, and a polygraph test cleared
Grossi. Looks like the cops in Stark County, Ohio will have to
actually investigate this crime. |
“You can take the handcuffs off,” Judge Richard Damiani
said.
And with that, Kenneth Ireland, a man who has been in jail for 21 years
— and was
supposed to spend decades more behind bars — walked away a free
man. DNA set him free. |
Nine rounds of DNA
testing have excluded Ernest Sonnier as the man who kidnapped and raped
an Alief, Texas woman in 1986, and identified two convicted felons as
the actual perpetrators. His conviction was the result of faulty
eyewitness identification and junk science by the Houston Police Crime
Lab. |
Police
were convinced that Michelle Moore-Bosko, a young Navy wife, was raped
and murdered by eight men in her small Norfolk apartment in 1997 while
her husband was away at sea. And five of them confessed. But
Bosko's apartment showed no signs of mass attack, and the DNA left
behind matched only one man: Omar A. Ballard, a convicted sex offender,
who gave details of the killing and said he acted alone. The
four
others who confessed -- Danial
J. Williams,
Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek E. Tice and Eric C. Wilson --
all Navy sailors, later recanted but were
convicted anyway, and three of them are serving life sentences. UPDATE: Derek Tice wins state habeas. Because of one mistake by his lawyers, one of the men convicted in the 1997 rape and murder of a young Navy wife could be set free, a judge has found. The state, of course, says it will appeal and wants Tice kept in prison while it does so. Click HERE to read the judge's decision. UPDATE: 1/13/01 - Unbelievable! On the same day four former Virginia attorneys general declared that the Norfolk Four are innocent of the rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko, the Virginia Supreme Court flipped his habeas and reinstated his conviction. UPDATE: 4/21/11 - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit unanimously upheld a lower court's decision to grant a petition to clear the criminal record of Derek Tice, one of four former sailors convicted in the 1997 rape and murder of a Navy wife. One down, three to go. Alan Berlow, an independent free lance writer who has written frequently about wrongful convictions (an earlier article about the Chris Ochoa case for Salon magazine is a classic), has done it again. His piece "What Happened in Norfolk?" picks apart the case against the Norfolk Four, four Navy sailors stationed in Norfolk, Virginia who many believe were wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko, the wife of another seaman. Three of the men are still locked up despite the fact that DNA evidence found on the victim was linked to another man, Omar Ballard, who subsequently confessed to having committed the crime by himself. Margaret Edds, the author of one of the best books on the Earl Washington wrongful conviction (“An Expendable Man”), has turned her laser-like focus on the infamous Norfolk Four case in this cover story from the Richmond Style Weekly. Anything You Say. UPDATE: While the clemency petition submitted during the administration of Virginia Governor Mark Warner continues to languish on the desk of his successor, Governor Tim Kaine, 26 more voices have joined the throng of police, prosecutors, judges and politicians urging pardon and release of the Norfolk Four. Retired FBI agents conclude Norfolk Four are innocent victims of Virginia's system. UPDATE: 8/6/09 - Gov. Tim Kaine gives half a loaf -- conditional pardon and commutation of sentence -- to three of the Norfolk four. This means they will be released from prison but the Governor refuses to recognize that they are factually innocent. Gov. Kaine has aspirations to higher office, and apparently thinks that doing the right thing will cost him votes. UPDATE: 9/15/09 - A federal judge has overturned the rape and murder convictions of Derek Elliott Tice, one of the "Norfolk Four," ruling that his lawyers should have challenged the use of his confession at his trial. Expect the Commonwealth of Virginia to appeal to the very conservative 4th Circuit Court. UPDATE: 11/20/09 -- Does it ever end? U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams, who overturned the rape and murder convictions of Derek Tice, has ruled that Tice can be re-tried on the original charges. The state has 120 days to decide whether to re-charge him. UPDATE: 8/5/11 - After dragging out the process nearly two more years, the Commonwealth of Virginia has dropped all charges against Derek Tice. One down, three to go. |
After eight years and uncounted dashed hopes, DeShawn Reed
and
Marvin Reed walked out of custody into the free sunshine Friday morning
after prosecutors decided not to retry them for a 2000 shooting that
left a man paralyzed. They were the victims of faulty eyewitness
identification. |
On Tuesday, July 07, 2009, 43-year-old Ronald
Kitchen, who
confessed under extreme physical duress to a taking part in five
murders 21 years ago, was exonerated and freed from prison. The
confession was extracted by Detective Michael Kill, who worked under
Commander Jon Burge. Kitchen spent nine of his 21 years behind bars on
death row. |
Nancy
Smith and Joseph Allen were convicted of sexually abusing young
children in August of 1994. Smith, a 37-year-old single mother
with four children, was a bus driver for the Lorain, Ohio Head Start.
The prosecution charged that after delivering the children to
school, she would sometimes keep three or four of them and take them to
a mysterious location, where she and a man known to the children only
as "Joseph" would commit various sexual acts with them, make
them drink urine, and poke them with needles and sticks. But an
examination of the police investigation leaves many disturbing
questions; questions about the children's testimony, questions about
whether Smith and Allen even knew each other -- questions about
whether, in fact, any crimes were committed at all. UPDATE: 2/22/07 - Nancy Smith’s bid for freedom Tuesday was rejected for a number of reasons, including a parole board official’s opinion that she hadn’t served enough time after being convicted of molesting children while she was a Head Start bus driver in the 1990s. They Want a Confession to Crimes She did not Commit UPDATE: 2/4/09 - Investigator Martin Yant, who has helped to free 12 innocent people, has worked on Nancy Smith's case for 13 years. He has obtained piles of evidence that prove her innocence of charges she molested four young children. That evidence can get Nancy a re-trial, or at least re-sentencing. Shining Light on Abuse-Hysteria Conviction. UPDATE: 2/4/09 - Nancy Smith freed on bond. UPDATE: 6/24/09 - Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen Acquitted. UPDATE: 12/11/09 - Merry Christmas, Nancy and Joseph. The Ohio Attorney General has joined local prosecutors to challenge the acquittals of Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen. In court documents filed with the 9th District Court of Appeals, they claim that Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge didn’t have the authority to acquit them. The State of Ohio wants Nancy and Joseph back in prison. It's not about truth. It has nothing to do with justice. It's about winning, and maintaining every win at all costs. UPDATE: 1/29/11 - Ohio Supreme Court reinstates Nancy Smith's conviction, orders her returned to prison. |
Tim Kennedy walked away from jail in Colorado Springs, CO
on May 29, 2009 after spending 14
years behind bars for what he maintains was a wrongful conviction in a
1991 execution-style shooting death of a Colorado Springs couple.
The DA, however, wants to put him right back in prison, despite his DNA
exclusion. |
Jerry Lee Evans joined a brotherhood of sorts on May 27, 2009 when he walked out of a courtroom after more than 22 years behind bars for a rape that DNA proves he did not commit. Evans, 47, was the 20th man cleared by DNA evidence in Dallas County, Texas, which has had more exonerations than any other county in the nation since 2001 when the state began allowing post-conviction genetic testing. |
Recently
discovered DNA evidence
proves that House did not rape Carolyn Muncey immediately before she
was killed in 1985 in Union County, north of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Other
evidence has surfaced that might show that House did not rape or kill
Muncey. While Tennessee's judiciary argues over how many
jurors can dance on the head of a pin, Paul Gregory House remains on
death row. UPDATE - 5/12/09: Charges dropped against former TN death row inmate [pdf format - use Acrobat Reader]
Can we rely on
forensic science as the arbiter of truth in the courtroom? In his
latest investigation for Seed Magazine, writer
Simon Cooper exposes a case of corrupted science at the heart of our
justice system -- and the forensic failures that put a man on
Tennessee's death row.
|
More than 16 years ago, 13-year-old Thaddeus Jimenez was arrested for a street gang murder on Chicago's Northwest Side, despite his claim of innocence. A judge sentenced him as an adult to 50 years in prison, describing Jimenez as a "little punk, probably too young to shave, but old enough to commit a vicious murder. But the youngest person wrongly convicted and then exonerated has been freed from prison. A man arrested in Indiana is suspected of the murder for which Jimenez was wrongly convicted. |
After more than nine years locked up in prison, fighting to overturn his 1999 rape conviction, Sgt. Brian W. Foster finally won his freedom in February, 2009. But the battle to restore his military rank, pay, career and life is just beginning. |
After serving 25 years in prison for two rapes he has
always denied committing, Joseph Fears, Jr. of Columbus, Ohio is
finally being released. He first began asking for DNA testing in
1995, but was opposed by prosecutors and denied by judges. After
the Columbus Dispatch included his story in its 2008 series, Test of Convictions, the state
allowed the DNA testing, and Joseph was cleared. |
Victor Burnette of Richmond, VA was released from prison
in 1987, after serving 8 years for a rape he always said he did not
commit. DNA has demonstrated Victor is innocent. So far, he
has waited two years for Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine to act on his pardon
application. The Commonwealth's Attorney has no objection, but
the rape victim remains convinced that Victor assaulted her. |
It's a case of technicalities. It's a case of changed
stories. Of questionable evidence. For Joshua Kezer and the
attorneys representing him, it's a case of
unjustified imprisonment, an unfair trial and new evidence that proves
Kezer was not the right man. Kezer's defense team has
reason to be optimistic. Cole County Judge Richard Callahan
has thrown out a conviction before in
a similar trial. UPDATE: February 18, 2009 - Joshua's attorneys' optimism was on target. After 17 years in prison for a murder Judge Callahan says Joshua did not commit, he has walked out of prison a free man. |
In 1985, Timothy Cole was a student in Lubbock when he was
arrested and accused of being the Texas Tech rapist. A string of coeds
had been raped, and the young African-American man from Fort Worth,
who'd never been in trouble with the law before, was convicted largely
on the eyewitness account of one rape victim. The real rapist,
Jerry Wayne Johnson, waited for the statute of limitations to toll in
1995 and began writing to the courts, confessing. Judges and the
prosecutor who obtained Timothy's conviction ignored him.
Finally, in 2007, Johnson's letter of confession reached Timothy's
mother. It was too late for Timothy. He died in prison in
1999 from an asthma attack. |
In
1985, when Robert Lee Stinson of Milwaukee was 21 years old, he was
convicted of the murder of a 63-year-old woman who had been savagely
beaten to death the previous year. Robert's conviction was based
on
bite mark evidence that didn't even match--he had a tooth missing where
the bite marks indicated a tooth, a fact that didn't bother the state's
"experts" at all. DNA evidence rules him out conclusively. UPDATE: 7/27/09 - Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Norman Gahn insists that Robert Stinson is guilty, but has decided not to re-try him. Maybe Gahn is worried about the effects of the facts on a contemporary jury. |
A state appellate court has ordered a new trial for
Chaunte Dean Ott, a
Milwaukee, WI man accused of murdering a South Milwaukee runaway in
1995. Tests showed DNA found on the victim matched DNA discovered
on
two other slaying victims, raising the specter that a serial killer is
still at
large. Police and prosecutors continue to insist they believe
Chaunte is guilty, since they do not want to admit they not only got
the wrong guy, they also kept the real killer on the streets to rape
and murder at least two more women. UPDATE - May 20,2009: Okay, now the Milwaukee cops concede that there's a serial killer out there. But the DA is determined to re-try Chaunte Ott, so the authorities are twisting themselves into pretzels to explain away the DNA evidence. Ex-inmate's story of serial killer is no longer far-fetched. UPDATE - June 5, 2009: In a hastily scheduled court proceeding, the Milwaukee County district attorney's office announced that it will not retry a man who was freed after serving 13 years in prison for the murder of a 16-year-old girl. |
James S. Anderson of Los Angeles, CA has spent his last
Christmas
behind bars in the State of Washington. A state appeals court erased
the 31-year-old's conviction for armed
robbery, saying new evidence uncovered by a University of
Washington Law School student corroborates what Anderson has always
said: He was in California when a group of men hit a Tacoma grocery
store in 2004. |
Since he arrived on Texas’ Death Row in 1999, Michael Roy Toney, of Lake Worth, has proclaimed his innocence to anyone he thought might listen. Nine and a half years later, he has everyone’s attention. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has overturned Toney’s capital murder conviction because Tarrant County prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to his defense. Among the 14 documents were records that cast doubt on the testimony of two key witnesses against him. |
In 1998, when teacher Jimmy Ates of Crestview, Florida was
convicted -- 7 years after the crime -- of murdering his wife, the only
evidence prosecutors had against him was the FBI test that concluded
the lead in the bullets that killed Norma Ates matched the lead in
bullets Jimmy owned. The bullet lead test was discredited in
2005. Now Jimmy's conviction has been reversed and he has been
given a new trial. |
It was bad enough when, in the mid-1990's, a shotgun blast
tore away half of Ricardo's face. He survived, badly
disfigured. But that ordeal was nothing compared with what
happened in 2003 -- Ricardo was convicted of sexually assaulting an
8-year-old boy and sentenced to 40 years in prison. While Ricardo
was locked up, the assaults continued, but the authorities ignored his
pleas of innocence. Other inmates helped him obtain DNA testing
that excluded Ricardo and identified the serial predator. |
Audrey
Edmunds, a former Waunakee, WI baby sitter imprisoned for nearly 10
years
after being convicted in the shaken-baby death of a 7- month-old girl,
is seeking a new trial, arguing that the scientific evidence used to
convict her is no longer valid. "Since Audrey Edmunds' trial . . . a
large body of new scientific
evidence has emerged that supports her claim of innocence," according
to a brief seeking a new trial for Edmunds filed by attorneys and law
students for the Wisconsin Innocence Project. UPDATE: 1/26/07 - In a two-day hearing, six physicians challenged the medical validity of the evidence that convicted Audrey Edmunds in 1996. Among them was the forensic pathologist who testified against her at trial. No Confidence in SBS Diagnosis UPDATE: 2/22/07 - Audrey Edmunds says life would have crushed her by now, if not for her faith in God -- and her belief that she will soon be reunited with her daughters. The Human Toll of Flawed Science UPDATE: 2/23/07 - In tense, combative testimony, a medical witness for the state forcefully rejected recent studies that raise doubts about shaken baby syndrome. The combative testimony of Dr. Betty Spivack reflects the divide among physicians in shaken-baby cases. One camp believes certain signs and symptoms are proof of abuse, while the other side argues that such indicators also can be seen in children who've been sick or had minor accidents. Defending the Conviction UPDATE: 2/24/07- One of the physicians who cared for Natalie Beard at University (now UW) Hospital in the final hours of her life testified Friday he's certain that the 7-month-old was shaken to death and that the injury occurred shortly before she came to the hospital. "She died from inflicted traumatic brain injury -- that is, she was shaken," said Dr. William Perloff, retired head of pediatric intensive care for the hospital. "In her case, there was evidence of her head hitting a surface." UPDATE: 1/24/08: Twelve years after she was sent to prison on charges of shaking a baby to death, a former Waunakee day-care provider should get a new trial, a state appeals court has ruled. New evidence in the case "shows that there has been a shift in mainstream medical opinion since Edmunds' trial as to the cause of the types of injuries Natalie (Beard) suffered," the three-judge panel unanimously ruled. The Attorney General is mulling whether to appeal the ruling. UPDATE: The Attorney General decided not to appeal. Audrey is finally a free woman. |
Miguel Roman has been in prison in Connecticut since 1988
for the rape and murder of his girlfriend, Carmen Lopez. He was
convicted despite trial testimony from an FBI investigator that tests,
even back in 1988, excluded Miguel as the killer. Now DNA has not
only excluded him, but has identified the real killer and tied him to
two other rape/murders. We may be premature to list Miguel among
the freed, because he is still in prison, but we hope the Connecticut
authorities will do the right thing -- finally. This case is
proof, once again, that when an innocent person is wrongly convicted,
the real criminal is free to commit more crimes. UPDATE: Miguel's conviction was set aside, a new trial was ordered, and he was freed on December 19, 2008. |
In 2006, authorities in Sunnyvale, CA realized that Mashelle Bullington was not the gun-toting burglar they thought when they locked her away for more than three years in prison in 1995. But it was not until November of 2008, during a brief hearing, that her name was finally cleared. |
Steven Barnes of Utica, NY was convicted of rape and
second-degree murder in the strangling
death of Kimberly
Simon, a high school student, in 1985. At his trial, a
crime lab analyst testified that impressions on Barnes' truck matched
Ms. Simon's jeans, a conclusion that simply cannot be supported by
science. Tests concluded in mid-November, 2008
showed that Barnes' DNA matched none of four samples found on Kimberly
Simon's body and clothing. After almost 20 years in prison,
Steven Barnes has been released from prison. |
After 27 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit,
William Dillon of Viera, Florida has been freed on bail after DNA
excluded him as the killer. His retrial is scheduled for January,
2009. His lawyer, Melissa Montle of the Florida Innocence
Project, says she doesn't see how he can be retried. "All they
have is a fraud, an admitted perjurer, a snitch, and a half-blind
eyewitness." |
Joe White, Thomas Winslow, Ada JoAnn
Taylor, Kathy Gonzalez, Deb Sheldon and James Dean were convicted of
murdering and raping 68-year-old Helen Wilson in 1985. White and
Winslow were convicted by juries; the other defendants were convinced
by police investigators to plead guilty. DNA tests obtained in
White's and Winslow's bids for exoneration prove that none of the six defendants had anything to
do with Mrs. Wilson's murder. She was killed by Bruce
Allen Smith, who acted alone. |
Arthur Johnson of Sunflower, Mississippi is poised to
become the first inmate freed by DNA exoneration in that state's
history. Johnson is serving a 55-year sentence for a 1992 rape
conviction -- a rape that DNA tests show he did not commit. His
freedom, however, is no sure bet. Mississippi has no legal
procedures in place to deal with evidence preservation or
post-conviction DNA testing. One thing is certain, however: There
are a lot more Arthur Johnsons in Mississippi's prisons. UPDATE: 2/25/08 - Arthur Johnson was released on $25,000 bond and went home with his family for the first time in 15 years. Although he has been excluded by DNA, the Sunflower County DA will re-try Johnson in July, 2008. UPDATE: 10/15/08: After Arthur Johnson's attorney, Emily Maw of the Cardozo Innocence Project, prevailed upon Mississippi authorities to run the rape kit DNA through the state's DNA bank, a match was found and the real rapist was identified. Sunflower County authorities could no longer maintain the charade that Arthur Johnson was anything but innocent. All charges against him have been dropped. No word on whether these authorities will apologize to the woman who was raped by the real criminal while Arthur was wrongly imprisoned. |
A New York state appellate panel has thrown out the convictions of Daivery Taylor, a Long Island personal injury attorney and his firm, Silverman & Taylor, finding that the state presented insufficient evidence that the defendants used "steerers" to sign up accident victims or that they coached clients to fabricate injuries. The 2nd Department not only threw out the conviction but also dismissed the 32-count indictment. |
Erick Daniels of Durham, NC spent nearly a third of his 22
years behind bars for crimes a judge has now said he did not
commit. Daniels was 14 when he was charged with
being one of two armed
robbers who burst into the home of Ruth Brown, a police department
employee, on Sept. 21, 2000, and stole her pocketbook containing $6,231
in cash. Ms. Brown picked out his photo from a middle school year
book. Her identification was the only evidence against
Erick. Recently, another client of Erick's trial attorney
confessed to the robbery and said Erick had no role in the crime. |
While a 28-year-old woman was being raped at White Rock
Lake in
August 1981, Johnnie Earl Lindsey was at work, pressing pants at a
commercial laundry business. But Johnnie's rock-solid alibi, time
clock punch cards that backed up his claim, were trumped when the
victim picked him out of a photo lineup mailed to her by Dallas
police. Now DNA tests -- part of Dallas DA Craig Watkins' massive
review of cases -- have made Johnnie the 19th Dallas defendant cleared
in the program. |
Darryl Burton of St. Louis, MO was convicted in 1985 of
capital murder and armed
criminal action -- although thre was no physical evidence connecting
him to the crime -- and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of
parole for 50 years. His conviction was overturned because the
state's key witness lied about his own extensive criminal record.
The state will not retry Darryl, who has been released and returned to
his family. |
A man who spent nearly 20 years behind bars is walking
free
after new evidence showed that he was wrongfully convicted of murder in
the 1988 shooting of a motorist in Southeast Washington, DC. A
judge ordered the release of Aaron Michael Howard this month after
the prosecutor withdrew from the case in open court, saying he could no
longer represent the government in trying to validate the jury's guilty
verdict. |
Charged with murder in Queens, NY in 1994, Kareem rejected a plea deal for 5 years in prison if he would plead guilty to manslaughter. Kareem knew he was innocent, so he went to trial. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. His conviction was thrown out after Kareem's lawyers produced the taped confession of another man, and other witnesses recanted. Kareem, who wants a new trial, has been freed on bond, which was posted by his pro bono investigator, Joseph O'Brien, a former FBI agent and author of bestselling mob book "Boss of Bosses." |
During 18 years in prison, Robert McClendon of Columbus,
Ohio has steadfastly denied the
rape that put him there -- claims from a former drug dealer that few
took seriously.
Now, he has a favorable DNA test.
The Ohio Innocence Project delivered the test results on July 22, 2008.
The
semen on the 10-year-old victim's underwear could not have come from
McClendon. But what happens next is unclear, and
Robert is still in prison. UPDATE: August 11, 2008 - Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Charles Schneider, citing the DNA test, freed Robert McClendon. Prosecutors are expected to drop the charges within the next few weeks. Free at last! |
Aquil K. Wiggins has spent nine years fighting what he
says was
a wrongful conviction in 1999 for a robbery and attempted carjacking
outside a Hampton, VA Food Lion. Now Wiggins, 31,
may have an opening that his lawyer said could
lead to the case being reopened — and possibly Wiggins' exoneration —
before his scheduled release in 2012. UPDATE: July 20, 2008 - Aquil wasn't officially exonerated, but he has been set free. His original conviction was vacated, and Aquil entered an Alford plea to the original charges, which allows him to maintain his innocence but acknowledges the state could obtain another conviction against him. He was then sentenced to time served and released. |
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 him 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.” UPDATE: January 29, 2009 - Apparently when county prosecutor Yoder looked at the evidence withheld in 1995, and weighed it against the slim "evidence" used to get a conviction back then, he decided jurors were not likely to buy into it. Charges dismissed. No apology, of course. Stay tuned for a well-deserved lawsuit. Link: A John Maki youtube
Documentary
It Could Happen to Anyone: The Wrongful Conviction of Alan Beaman |
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. UPDATE: On June 18, 2014, Lynn DeJac Peters died of cancer. She was 50 years old. |
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. UPDATE: September 9, 2008: Prosecutors in Tim Masters case get public censure for their misconduct. Both Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair are judges now, and this isn't Gilmore's first censure for prosecutor misconduct. Nonetheless, they are expected to be easily re-elected in 2010 -- assuming anyone runs against either of them -- because the public has such a short span of attention, and the voters don't really care. UPDATE: July 30, 2010: Murder conviction was built on cop's lies. Lt. Jim Broderick, one of the lead investigators in the case against Masters, appeared before specially appointed Judge James Hartmann in a hearing that lasted about 12 minutes. Broderick listened to the perjury charges against him but waived his right to hear a formal reading of the indictment. He did not enter a plea. He is scheduled to be back in court for a status conference September 28, 2010. |
It was 1993 when Dorka Lisker was murdered in her home in
Sherman
Oaks, CA. Her 17-year-old son, Bruce, was
charged with
the murder. He had a drug problem and a history of fighting with his
mother. Phillip Rabichow, then a deputy
district attorney,
convinced a jury that Bruce was guilty. As the years rolled by and
Lisker
reached middle age in prison, Rabichow rarely gave the case a second
thought.
But in 2005, new information had shaken his faith in the fairness of
the
verdict: A bloody footprint found at the scene did not match Lisker's
shoes.
A mysterious phone call made around the time of the murder raised
further
questions. UPDATE: August 18, 2005 - FBI confirms shoe print at scene not Lisker's. UPDATE: August 8, 2009 - Judge overturns Bruce Lisker's conviction in 1983 killing of his mother UPDATE: The DA has decided to drop the charges. Bruce is a free man. |
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 NameUpdate: May 13,
2004
Prosecutors Won't Oppose Marty Tankleff's Hearing UPDATE: August 4, 2005 Teen Says His Father Admitted Role in Tankleff Killings UPDATE: March 17, 2006 Judge Rejects Tankleff Re-Trial UPDATE: December 21, 2007 NY State Appeals Court Orders Re-Trial UPDATE: December 31, 2007 NY Investigating DA's Handling of Tankleff Murders UPDATE: January 3, 2008 Marty Tankleff will not be Retried |
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. UPDATE: August 6, 2008 - Steven Phillips has been officially exonerated of all the rapes he was wrongly convicted of committing back in 1982. The GPS monitor attached to his ankle when he was paroled in the fall of 2007 has been removed, and Steven is free to come and go and live as he pleases. |
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? |
![]() Dubbs in 1999 |
![]() Composite Sketch |
![]() 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.
Lawyers say
the case against Bob and Randy could be titled The Insider's Guide
to Prosecutorial Misconduct.Bob Gondor and Randy Resh Update:
Bid for New
Trial Denied
Update: Ohio Supreme Court Unanimously Overrules Appellate Court, Grants New Trials Update: Gondor and Resh Released, New Trials Set for Spring of 2007 Update: Resh Not Guilty Prosecutors re-thinking whether to try Gondor Update: Charges Against Gondor Dropped |
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. |
The
victim,
shot while riding on the back of her husband's motorcycle in South
Florida, identified someone else as her assailant. The
best-positioned eyewitness
was unable to pick out Persad from a photo lineup; he, too, picked
someone
else. He couldn't identify him in court, either. The same
eyewitness
said there was nothing unusual about the assailant's car, while
Persad's
car had foreign slogans written all over it. Moreover, three
witnesses
testified Persad was studying for an exam with them when the incident
happened.
But the victim's husband was shown a photo of Persad by an ex-FBI
investigator,
told Persad was the assailant, identified him in court -- and Persad is
doing
43 years in prison. UPDATE: 3/1/07 - Persad's was one of the most controversial criminal cases in recent memory: one eyewitness, a 90-second look at a stranger before the stranger fired. No physical evidence. Persad's case wended in and out of courts for years. A month ago, Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga threw out the ID, the keystone of the case. On March 1, 2007, prosecutors wiped Persad's slate clean. Charge dropped in "road rage" shooting .
|
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. |
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. UPDATE: December 25, 2015 - Tommy Doswell was found dead on a bridge walkway on Christmas, in Pittsburgh, PA. |
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. |
Canadian
William Mullins-Johnson, who spent more than a third of his
life in prison for a rape and murder that may have never taken place,
stepped into
the sunshine on September 21, 2005, freed on bail from a 12-year "hell"
while
Ottawa decides whether he fell victim to another Canadian miscarriage
of
justice.
The 35-year-old Mullins-Johnson, of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., was
convicted in 1994 of sodomizing and strangling his four-year-old niece
Valin Johnson, who was found dead in her bed on the morning of June 27,
1993.
Two experts, including Ontario's chief pathologist, now say Valin was
never sexually abused or strangled. They argue she in fact died of
natural causes, possibly from choking on her own vomit caused by a
chronic stomach ailment. UPDATE: 10/15/07 - Mullins-Johnson officially found innocent. |
George
Rodriguez's Long Saga
George Rodriguez was
sentenced to 60 years in prison for aggravated rape and kidnapping,
based primarily on HPD Crime Lab's serological [based on blood
type only] identification of him. A panel of six scientists has
reviewed
the evidence in Rodriguez's case and reported the crime lab's
conclusions were "scientifically unsound". Of course, he is still
in prison, too. George Rodriguez
UPDATE: George Rodriguez, exonerated by DNA, wonders "Why am I Still in Prison?" UPDATE [Link]: George Rodriguez released. UPDATE [Link] : George Rodriguez will not be retried. UPDATE - 3/2/11 -- The Harris County, TX District Attorney is requesting the full exoneration of George Rodriguez, based on additional DNA tests that completely exclude him and identify the true perpetrators: Manuel Beltran and Isidro Yanez. |
In December,
1991, Troy Hopkins of Richmond, VA was convicted of killing Curtis
Kearney in July, 1990. In 1992, another man confessed to the
murder, and in 1994 the Virginia Court of Appeals reversed Troy's
conviction. His vindication didn't last long; the Virginia
Supreme Court reinstated his conviction, and he spent 10 years in
prison -- until he was released on parole -- for another man's
crime. Now Virginia Governor Mark Warner has pardoned Troy,
saying, "I am convinced that Mr. Hopkins is innocent of the charges for
which he was convicted". |
For 26 years, the people of Miami, Florida believed the Bird Road Rapist was Luis Diaz, and that he had been caught and locked up. The rapist was named after the location in the Miami area where the rapes occurred. The rapist used the same method with all of his victims: He attacked young women driving in the Bird Road-U.S. 1 area of Coral Gables. He would signal the women to pull over by flashing his headlights, then force them to have sex at gunpoint. Diaz was convicted based on identifications made by eight victims, even though some of them initially described their attacker as being 6-feet tall, 200 pounds, and fluent in English. Diaz is 5-foot-3, about 130 pounds and speaks little to no English. He also constantly smelled of onions because he worked as a fry cook - although none of the victims described their attacker having that odor. Now DNA as excluded Diaz as the Bird Road Rapist, and he has been set free. |
Alejandro Dominguez was 16 when he was charged with the September 1989 home invasion and rape in Waukegan. He was convicted in a 1990 trial, in large part because the victim identified him as her attacker. Dominguez insisted he was wrongly identified and was innocent. Sentenced to 9 years in state prison, he served more than 4 years, receiving time off for good behavior, before he was released in December 1993. Even though he was free, Dominguez continued to try to prove his innocence. He persuaded lawyer Jed Stone to seek DNA testing on semen recovered from the victim. The tests excluded Dominguez as a source of the semen, and they prompted Lake County prosecutors and Stone to ask a judge to vacate the convictions. |
In a New
Jersey case with striking similarities to those of Clarence Elkins of
Ohio and Ralph Armstrong of Wisconsin, a Superior Court judge has
thrown out Peterson's 1987 conviction for rape and murder and ordered a
new trial. Peterson has been excluded by DNA as the donor of
hairs that the prosecution claimed "matched" his hairs and "proved" his
guilt. |
Ralph Armstrong [pdf
format]
In the same
week that a judge in Ohio decided that the DNA exclusion of
Clarence Elkins as the source of sperm found in the murder victim's
vagina
and her granddaughter's underwear was not enough to overturn Elkins'
rape
and murder conviction, the Wisconsin Supreme Court stepped up to the
plate
and gave Ralph Armstrong his freedom in a strikingly similar
case.
Armstrong gives all of us hope.UPDATE - 4/13/07: Prosecutors retrying a 1980 murder charge against Ralph Armstrong in Madison, WI cannot use the results of a DNA test on a key piece of evidence because the results were obtained in violation of a court order, a judge has ruled. Dane County Circuit Judge Daniel Moeser said the state acted in "bad faith" when it went ahead with the testing without notifying the defense and, in the process, used up the material - in violation of the judge's order. Bad Faith. UPDATE - 4/25/08: Now we know why the state violated a court order to test -- and use up -- key evidence. The state, and specifically, Assistant DA John Norsetter, has known for 13 years that Ralph Armstrong's brother confessed to the crime of which Ralph was convicted. Norsetter, who retired from the office last year, allegedly not only failed to investigate or notify Armstrong’s defense attorneys of this confession, he subsequently ordered a test that destroyed evidence that could have established Steve Armstrong’s guilt. Worse Than Bad Faith UPDATE - 8/1/09: Ralph Armstrong’s long wait for freedom, four years after his conviction for the 1980 rape and murder of a UW-Madison student was overturned, came closer to an end Friday after a judge dismissed the charges against him. Reserve Judge Robert Kinney, of Rhinelander, said a Dane County prosecutor in 1995 should have told Armstrong’s attorneys about a reported confession to the murder of Charise Kamps by Armstrong’s brother. He also said a prosecutor-ordered test in 2006 caused the destruction of a semen stain on a piece of evidence that could have eliminated Armstrong as a suspect in Kamps’ murder. Is it really almost over? |
In October,
2004, Kevin Fox of Wilmington, Illinos was arrested following a 14-hour
interrogation in which investigators said he confessed to molesting and
murdering his 3-year-old daughter Riley in June of the same year.
The prosecutor, just days away from a hotly contested re-election bid
that he ended up losing, vowed to seek the death penalty. A
sheriff's officer called the FBI Lab at Quantico, Virginia in November
and told them to stop working on DNA evidence sent there for
analysis. Kevin's attorney convinced the new prosecutor to send
the evidence to a private lab for testing, and the DNA test results
"absolutely" exclude Kevin. Charges that could have led to his
execution have been dropped. Riley's killer remains free. UPDATE: 5/28/10 - Riley Fox's killer, identified by DNA as Scott Wayne Eby, has been charged with abducting the 3-year-old from her own bed, raping and murdering her. After putting the Fox family through hell with the bogus charges against Kevin, then losing a $15.5 Million lawsuit for malicious prosecution, Will County Sheriff Paul Kaupas has apologized to the Foxes. Well, sort of. He had a spokesman do it on his behalf. So Little, So Late. |
A
former western Wisconsin police officer on trial for a second time in
the murder of his ex-girlfriend was cleared on April 29, 2005 after a
district attorney conceded he couldn't prove his guilt. Eau
Claire County District Attorney Rich White asked a judge to drop the
first-degree intentional homicide charge against Evan Zimmerman, whose
previous murder conviction was overturned on appeal. What drove the case against Evan Zimmerman is the same phenomenon that drove the cases against Scott Hornoff, John Maloney and so many of the other innocent men and women -- those who have been cleared and those who languish in prison -- tunnel vision on the part of investigators and prosecutors. Even when proven to be absolutely wrong, they cling to theories that keep dangerous criminals on the street and put us all at risk. |
Getting out of prison didn't free Jennifer Hall. Friends call and ask her to go out, but she mostly stays home. She takes college courses — online so she does not have to leave the house. Hall, who lives in Shawnee,KS with her parents, was convicted in 2001 of starting a fire at Cass Medical Center in Harrisonville, where she worked as a respiratory therapist. But last year a judge threw out the verdict and wrote a ruling highly critical of Hall's first attorney. At a second trial, in February, a jury took three hours to decide the fire was caused by an electrical short in an old clock cord. By then Hall, now 24, had been paroled after serving one day short of 12 months. |
Larry Souter,
53, of Grand Rapids, Michigan has been freed after serving 13 years of
a 20 to 60 year prison sentence. Souter was convicted in 1992 of
killing Kristy Ringler, whose body was found in the middle of a road in
1979. Authorities theorized Miss Ringler was hit in the head with
a whiskey bottle. New evidence indicates she was struck by a
passing motor home. |
The Colorado Supreme Court has reversed the felony murder
conviction and life sentence of Lisl Auman, who was found guilty even
though she was in custody
when a companion shot and killed a police officer. |
In May 1981, when Michael Williams was 16, a jury in
Jonesboro, LA rejected his claim of innocence, deliberating for less
than an hour before convicting him of the savage beating and sexual
assault of his math tutor. Nearly 24 years after his arrest,
independent DNA tests by three laboratories, including the Louisiana
state crime lab, show what Williams has long contended: He is not the
man who committed the crime. UPDATE: 10/30/07 - Michael Williams was just a high-school sophomore when he was tried as an adult for the rape of his 22-year-old tutor. The woman's head was covered during the attack, but she testified that she recognized the teenager by his voice. Despite a lack of physical evidence, Mr. Williams was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. When Mr. Williams was freed by DNA after 24 years in prison, he had nowhere to go. The Innocence Project tracked down several of his siblings, but after 24 years, they barely knew him, and refused to take him. A Stranger to His Family |
Cook County, Illinois prosecutors have dropped murder
charges against Dan Young, Jr. and Harold Hill, who have spent more
than 12 years behind bars, after DNA test results undermined their
confessions and testimony from a dentist
who implicated the two through a bite mark and a hickey. UPDATE: After only 14 months of freedom, while his reparations check sat on the governor's desk awaiting signature, Dan Young was killed by a hit-and-run driver. He died Short of His Dream . |
The Ohio Parole Board has decided Gary Reece, a
Cleveland-area man, has
spent the last 25 years behind bars for a crime he may not have
committed
and voted unanimously for his release. His conviction was based
entirely
on the uncorroborated testimony of alleged victim Kimberly Croft.
Reporters and others who have been following the case have noticed that
she has made very strange statements in public, to the point of
suggesting
a lack of sanity. For
example, on one television news program, she claimed that Gary Reece
actually killed her during the attack in question, but that 'Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves' brought her back to life. UPDATE: On July 26, 2010, Gary Reece died of cancer. He was 51 years old. He was the best ambassador the Ohio Innocence Project could ask for, sharing his story to help raise money for the group. Said Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, "Gary Reece spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit and he never once complained." |
Back in 1988, Texas
Department of Public Safety serologist Glen Adams testified that
Brandon Moon was among "15% of the population" who could have
contributed semen in a 1987 rape. Relying on that overstated
testimony, an El Paso jury convicted Moon and he was sentenced to 75
years in prison. It was
another win for junk science. In 2004, DNA cleared Brandon. |
Lawrenceville, IL UPDATE : Serial Killer Confesses to Joel's murder UPDATE : Julie's Conviction Thrown Out : Verdict at Re-Trial -- NOT GUILTY July 26, 2006 - Verdict Reading The Judge was notified that the jury had reached a verdict at 4:10 PM. The proceedings started at 4:24. Judge Vaughn requested that the court give the jury the respect it deserves and that no outburst of emotion will be tolerated. You would be removed from the courtroom. The Jury Foreman passed the Verdict to the Judge. The Judge read: NOT GUILTY! Julie burst into tears and then fainted to the floor. Ron Safer half caught her and brought her to a sitting position. Mark Harper came to the front and comforted her, and eventually she was able to stand. David Rands requested the jury be poled and one at a time they answered that their verdict given freely was Not Guilty. The Judge thanked the jury and they were dismissed. He thanked the Lawyers on both sides, and complemented them on their professionalism. Prosecutor Edwin Parkinson did not attend the Verdict reading |
DNA taken from
inside a ski mask worn by the killer of a Bridge City, LA
grocer excluded Ryan Matthews and his co-defendant, Travis Hayes and
implicated
a man with no connection to either Ryan or Travis. In June, 2004
Ryan
was freed from death row. But prosecutors are determined to keep
Travis
in prison for the rest of his life for a crime they know was committed
by
another man -- who remains free to continue killing. UPDATE: On 12/19/06, State District Judge Henry Sullivan overturned Travis' conviction. Travis was released to the custody of his aunt. He will be restricted to his aunt's house while the state decides whether or not to appeal Judge Sullivan's order. UPDATE: On 1/17/07, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick Jr. announced he will not bring Travis Hayes to trial again, deciding there is not enough evidence to secure a conviction against the man who spent nearly 10 years behind bars before he was released. |
John Michael Harvey
After serving 12 years of a
40-year sentence for sexual assault of a child, Harvey has been found
"actually
innocent" by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and released from
prison.
Click HERE to read about the prosecutorial misconduct that put him in prison and was given a free pass. |
Since 1989, at least 200 inmates have been released from
California prisons after courts found that they were unjustly
convicted. San Francisco
Magazine did a detailed analysis of
30 cases from around the state to find out what went wrong, and what
can
be done to prevent future injustices. |
Saying the
autopsy report was wrong, Winchester, TN District Attorney Mike Taylor dismissed a murder charge
against Margaret
Mignano, accused of killing her severely disabled
daughter with an overdose of medication. The murder charge was
based on the autopsy report of Dr. Charles Harlan of Nashville, a
forensic pathologist who is defending his medical license against state
charges of misdiagnosing causes of death in other cases and destroying
evidence in criminal investigations. |
In 1984, the body of Bruce's girlfriend, Sherry Fales
Williams, was found next to an interstate exit in Utah. Bruce was
convicted of raping and murdering her, even though two defense
witnesses testified he was
with them in Stockton, CA. After 19 years, DNA has shown what
Bruce has insisted all along -- he is innocent. |
Louis Greco
died behind bars in 1995 from cancer and heart disease. He
suffered horribly, losing a leg to amputation because he was denied
proper care for his diabetes. Along with co-defendants Peter Limone and Joseph Salvati ,
Louis was framed for murder by the Boston FBI to protect their
informant, mob hit man Steve "The Rifleman" Flemmi. Nine years
after Louis' death, the prosecutor has acknowledged he was an innocent
man. |
Sylvester's case is yet another example of how pressuring children to make false allegations leads to wrongful convictions. In 1984, two young girls were molested by their cousin who was also a juvenile. Their grandmother, thinking the cousin would be sent to prison, convinced the girls to accuse Sylvester Smith instead. Now grown, the victims have recanted and are supported by the trial testimony of one of them -- she told the defense attorney her grandmother said to accuse Smith. |
San Joaquin County, California
Superior Court Judge Stephen Demetras ordered the release of
36-year-old Peter Rose after 10 years of incarceration. Convicted
of sexually assaulting a 13 year-old Lodi girl in 1994, Rose was
sentenced to 27 years in prison. With no history of violent crime
or sexual assault, Rose has maintained his innocence from the
beginning. DNA testing has proved him right. It has also
shown the tragic results when police browbeat a child into accusing the
person they have already decided is guilty. |
In
his second day of questioning by Los Angeles police detectives,
David
Allen Jones sealed his fate. Although never admitting to murder,
he
repeatedly incriminated himself in the deaths of three prostitutes. By
the
time he got to describing what happened with the third woman, Mary
Edwards,
the story came easily.
On the strength of the incriminating statements, a jury convicted Jones
of the three killings. But there was a problem: Jones did not kill
them.
Eleven years later, DNA and other evidence exonerated Jones and a judge
voided his conviction in the killings. He was freed in March, 2004. |
Twenty-three
years after he was convicted of murdering a Braintree, MA
man in an ambush, Frederick Weichel has won a new trial because of
newly discovered evidence and allegations that the case was tainted by
James "Whitey" Bulger and the fugitive mobster's associates --
including the FBI. |
More than 17 years after Ernest
Willis went to death row for setting a house fire that consumed two
sleeping
women, West Texas prosecutors cited new suspects Monday. Faulty wiring perhaps. Maybe a defective ceiling
fan. Finding little to no
evidence of arson, the Fort Stockton district attorney said he would
file a motion today that is expected to make Willis the first inmate to
walk free from Texas' death row in seven years. Read more about Ernest's case and the other six who walked free from Texas' death row: Death Isn't Fair |
Citing
pervasive misconduct by prosecutors, a judge has reversed
convictions against David Munchinski, imprisoned for nearly 20 years in
a double murder case in Fayette County, PA. Visiting Judge Barry
Feudale accused three former Fayette County prosecutors -- two of whom
are now judges -- of "seeking and maintaining convictions to the
detriment of the search for the truth" in the case of a grisly murder
of two men in a Laurel Mountains cabin in 1977. But wait! The State is appealing, claiming the judge was barred from reversing David's conviction on "procedural grounds". The judge who reversed his conviction ordered David released on bail, but another court kept him behind bars, at the request of the Attorney General. Misconduct as Usual Click
HERE to read
Bill Moushey's 2002 "A Question of Innocence".
Update (10/8/08):
Judges carry 2 decades of misconduct, claims Munchinski lawyer
David
Munchinski has been in prison for over 20 years for murders he
says
he did not commit. But his daughter Raina has uncovered evidence
that
the star witness against him later admitted lying, prosecutors hid
exculpatory
evidence and Munchinski's co-defendant testified that another man
committed
the crimes with him. Update
(8/19/10):
Missing exhibits solidify Munchinski's innocence
"This solidifies the fact that everything in this case in which the government has had a hand in, from 1977 to the present, is highly suspicious, highly irregular, unorthodox, highly unusual, inexplicable and violative of every notion of fundamental fairness and due process of law," Munchinski's attorney, Noah Geary wrote in court filing. Update
(8/9/11): Prosecutors
weigh retrial of 'Bear Rocks Murders' defendant
On
August 5, 2011, Chief
Magistrate Lisa Pupo Lenihan said David Munchinski is entitled
to a new trial in the case, known as the Bear Rocks Murders, because
prosecutors withheld evidence that would have cast doubts on the man's
guilt. Prosecutors have 120 days to decide whether to re-try
him.
Update (9/30/11): David Munchinski has been released on bond pending the state's appeal of Judge Lenihan's decision granting him a new trial. Final Update: The State has decided not to retry David. He is a free man. |
Kevin Coleman of West Palm Beach, Florida, who spent 13 years in prison for a murder he said he didn't commit was freed after a judge learned investigators suppressed evidence that indicated he wasn't guilty. Circuit Judge Lucy Chernow Brown called the murder investigation ``shameful'' and said Coleman's conviction was " a stain on the record of this court." |
Clarence
Harrison of Decatur, GA, has spent 17 years in prison for rape,
kidnapping and robbery. The victim identified him from both a
photo
and live lineup. He has become the 150th person proven innocent
by
DNA in the past ten years. |
Ever wonder if it's different in other parts of the world
with legal systems that share the same origins as that in the US?
It's
not. When Kathy Sheffield was murdered in 1994, Lawrence knew he
didn't
do it, but he couldn't remember what happened, so he confessed.
He
served 7 years in prison. Now it turns out he's innocent. |
Arthur Lee Whitfield spent part of his first hours of freedom standing up on the bus that carried him home. Whitfield was released from prison after DNA tests exonerated him of raping two women in Ghent, VA in August 1981. He had served 22 years of a 63-year sentence. Whitfield had little to say to the investigator who helped convict him, or to the two women who at trial said they were sure he was the man who had raped them. “It would be nice for them to say they made a mistake,” he said. “It takes a big person to say they made a mistake.” |
At the age of
18, following a grueling 17-hour interrogation, Harold Hall of Los
Angeles, CA confessed to murdering two people. His conviction was
sealed with the fabricated testimony of professional "snitches".
It took 19 years, but Hall has finally been exonerated and
released. The real killer remains unknown and, presumably, at
large, thanks to the quick-and-dirty
work of LAPD. |
On
Jan. 25, 1995, Kenneth Conley was a young patrol officer from South
Boston, MA dispatched to a shooting and foot chase. Pursuing one
of the shooting suspects on foot, Conley was so focused on his prey
that he didn't see other Boston police officers beating an undercover
officer. When he testified to what he saw -- and didn't see --
the U.S. Attorney charged Conley with perjury. His conviction was
overturned twice after it
was learned Asst. U.S. Attorney Theodore Merritt withheld from the
defense evidence that his star witness actually couldn't remember where
Conley was in relation to the location where the undercover officer was
beaten. |
Robert
Carroll Coney was in prison when President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated. He was in prison when the Beatles came to America, when
men walked on the moon, when the war raged in Vietnam, when Communism
fell, and when the Internet and cellphones were invented. But after spending almost every day of the
last 42 years behind bars, Mr. Coney, 76, walked out of the Angelina
County jail in Lufkin. A state district judge had found credence
in Mr. Coney's longstanding claims that he had been beaten into
pleading guilty, without a lawyer, to a $2,000 Safeway supermarket
robbery that landed him a life sentence in 1962. The judge
further found a long-forgotten court order should have expunged those
criminal charges as far back as 1973. |
Ken Marsh spent 21 years in
California prisons for a crime that never happened. He was
convicted in 1984 of murdering 2-year-old Kenneth Buell based on
testimony of treating physicians -- with no independent corroboration
-- who were seeking to protect themselves from malpractice
claims.
His
conviction was reversed without an evidentiary hearing based on
insufficiency of the medical expert evidence.
Ken Marsh and his attorney, Tracy Emblem, have generously made available extensive forensic resources utilized in his case for the benefit of other innocent people facing similar charges. Visit Free Ken Marsh |
When a jailhouse snitch seeking a deal on
charges against her accused Robert Louis Armstrong of a 1998 triple
murder, Armstrong met willingly with Maricopa County
investigators. He knew he had been in Oregon when the murders
occurred. A cop put a clip on Armstrong's shirt that he said was
a "sensitivity
test" and declared Armstrong was lying. Armstrong was charged
with
3 counts of capital murder. A determined Public Defender
Investigator
found Armstrong's bus ticket and the bogus case began to unravel. |
This Sharpes,
FL case was a classic -- mistaken victim identification and perjured
snitch testimony put him in prison for a 1981 rape. He has been
exonerated by DNA, and freed after 22 years. |
Once
condemned to die by lethal injection for the 1997 murder of a Bridge
City, LA grocer, Ryan walked out of court a free man. Prosecutors
dropped all charges after DNA cleared Ryan and implicated another man. |
During the 10
years he spent in prison for a rape he did not commit, Neil Miller of
Boston, MA often thought about the man who should have been behind
bars. DNA exonerated Miller in 2000. The same DNA has
identified the real rapist, Lawrence Taylor. |
The latest inmate to be released from an Illinois prison after DNA tests exonerated him filed his own petition to seek the DNA test even though he has limited ability to read and write. Moreover, he was represented at his trial on rape charges 11 years ago by a lawyer who apparently was disbarred a short time later. |
It began after reading
THE PROBLEM OF FALSE CONFESSIONS IN THE POST-DNA WORLD by Steven Drizin
and Richard Leo (North Carolina Law Review, March 2004, Vol. 82 No. 3).
In their monograph they identified 125 false confessors of serious
felonies who have now been found to be legally innocent. Robert
Perske's search is only for persons with
"intellectual disabilities" who have been exonerated. So far, 34 have
been
found and the number is climbing. False Confessions
|
Police used
ruses -- and drawn guns -- to get Afton Cain to confess to robbing a
bank in a town she never heard of and implicate a woman -- Latosha
Haliburton -- she had never met. The case against them has fallen
apart, but the FBI agent, the cops and the prosecutor are
satisfied with their conduct. "I would do it all again," said the
prosecutor. That's the scariest part of this story. |
Weldon Wayne Carr will not be retried for murder and arson in the death of his wife. His conviction was originally overturned in 1997, when the Georgia Supreme Court cited the unreliability of evidence that a trained dog found a fire accelerant at the scene. The Court also rebuked then-prosecutor Nancy Grace -- now host of Court TV's "Closing Arguments" -- of engaging in "inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal conduct in the course of the trial." |
Nathaniel Lewis did not rape a fellow University
of Akron (Ohio) freshman.
It took his accuser's diary, a five-year prison stay and nearly two
years of waiting for courts, but Lewis has at last been vindicated. |
The Rhoads' Murders
In 1986,
newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads were stabbed to death in their Paris,
IL home. Randy
Steidl and Herb Whitlock were convicted of their muders on the
strength of perjured testimony that contrradicted the physical
evidence.
Update:
Randy
Steidl has been released
Herb Whitlock remains in prison, convicted by the same perjured testimony Update: Herb Whitlock granted new trial. Update: No new trial for Herb Whitlock - Freedom granted, but not innocence |
A judge has
tossed his 1974 murder conviction, finding the Boston police withheld
evidence that the snitch who was their star witness was in prison when
he said Adams confessed to him at his home. The snitch was
released from prison as reward for his perjury. Boston
prosecutors have let Adams
sit despite the release order because they can't find the file.
He's
the forgotten man. |
Two Sex
Abuse Witch Hunt Victims, Free at Last |
|
Gerald Amirault's Freedom | John Stoll |
The Feds made two cases against former
Chicago police officer Steve Manning, a murder in Illinois and a
kidnapping in Missouri. They based both on
the perjured testimony of notorious snitches, and put Manning on Death
Row
for the Illinois murder. Manning was cleared of the murder
conviction in 2000, but was left to serve a life sentence in the
Missouri kidnapping. Now he has been cleared of that bogus
conviction as well, and it appears the
kidnapping never even happened . |
Police and
prosecutors in East Boston, MA were certain Billy Leyden killed and
decapitated his brother Jackie in March, 2001. Fixated on what
they called "inconsistencies", they charged him with 1st degree
murder. Billy was released on bail but lost his job, and
neighbors locked their doors when they saw him coming. Then, in
January, 2004, Eugene McCollom confessed to killing Jackie Leyden, and
directed authorities to Jackie's head, buried on a beach in Ft.
Lauderdale, FL. Indeed, the head found there is Jackie's, and
charges against Billy are slated to be dismissed. But so far only
the Florida press is reporting this story. |
Sentenced to die for the murder
of a man he had never met, Alan Gell got a new trial when it was
learned prosecutors withheld an audio tape of their star witness saying
she had to "make up a story" about Jenkin's death. At Gell's
retrial, it took the jury only 2 1/2 hours to return its verdict:
Not Guilty Read the Raleigh, NC News-Observer's riveting series on the framing of Alan Gell: Who Killed Allen Ray Jenkins |
A classic, this case
has it all: botched crime scene processing, forensic fraud by the
FBI Lab, reliance on perjured testimony by jailhouse snitches,
manipulation of a credulous media to slander the defendant and poison
the jury pool, plus inciting hatred and a desire for revenge against
the defendant among the victims' families that is so intense they
cannot let it go even after the feds are forced to admit the defendant
didn't do the crime. Defense attorney Fred Heblich said, "I think that people looking at this, if nothing else, that they should take heart in the operation of the system." Truth in Justice respectfully disagrees. People looking at this, if nothing else, should be very, very afraid of the operation of the system. |
On Dec.
4, 2003 a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
ordered the State of California to release Thomas Lee Goldstein without
bail after finding that 24 years ago prosecutors had denied him a fair
trial. But California ignored the Court and has kept Goldstein in
custody. On January 30, 2004, the judges repeated their original
order, putting in capital letters their directive for Goldstein's "IMMEDIATE RELEASE FROM
CUSTODY." Hours after a judge dismissed Thomas Lee Goldstein's 24-year-old murder conviction, Goldstein was right back where he started his long legal struggle: standing in a courtroom, entering a plea of innocent. Superior Court Judge Arthur Jean granted a defense motion on February 2, 2004 to dismiss the conviction, but prosecutors refiled the case almost immediately. Innocence is Irrelevant UPDATE: On April 2, 2004, Thomas Lee Goldstein was finally freed when LA Deputy DA Patrick Connolly admitted the state lacks sufficient evidence to retry him. Justice Delayed 24 Years |
In 1997 an assailant dropped his hat when
he shot Boston police officer
Gregory Gallagher in the buttocks. Then the shooter burst into a
nearby
home, drank a glass of water and dropped his sweatshirt before
fleeing.
Later Officer Gallagher identified Stephan Cowans as the assailant
(although
the woman whose home was invaded disagreed) and a crime lab technician
said
a fingerprint on the water glass was Stephan's. Now DNA has
trumped
both. DNA on the hat, the sweatshirt and the water glass are from
the
same person -- but not from Stephan
. UPDATE: Two days after vowing to retry Stephan Cowans -- calling the fingerprint identification "compelling evidence" -- the Suffolk County District Attorney has admitted the print is not Stephan Cowans. Conviction Vacated UPDATE: 10/26/07 - Stephan Cowans was found shot to death in his home. |
In a decision
that sharply criticizes the actions of Pennsylvania parole officials, a
federal appeals court has ordered the release of Louis Mickens-Thomas
-- a 75-year-old Philadelphia man imprisoned since 1964 who for 40
years has
insisted he is innocent of the murder of which he was convicted --
after finding
that the board's latest explanations for denying his parole was a
"thinly
veiled excuse" that "leaves us with no doubt of its bad faith." UPDATE: January 21, 2011 -- Finally, seven years after the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that Louis Mickens-Thomas, an innocent man, be released "forthwith," he is actually going to leave prison. Mr. Mickens-Thomas, now 82 years old, will live with a nephew. The state's bad faith in this case is utterly disgusting. |
Update: |
Darryl Hunt was found
dead in his car on March 13, 2016. No cause of death was released. |
![]() |
At Last -- Darryl
Hunt has been Released! Landmark Series (including updates) from the Winston-Salem, NC Journal Murder, Race, Justice The State of North Carolina v. Darryl Hunt |
February 6,
2004: Darryl
Hunt officially
exonerated Unfortunately,
police and prosecutors in Winston-Salem were so thorough
in inciting hatred and a desire for revenge against Darryl Hunt in
victim
Deborah Sykes' family that her mother and step-father refuse to accept
that
another man raped and killed their daughter -- alone.
|
Since 1966, at least
20 people in Louisiana have been freed from prison
because judges found they had been wrongfully convicted of murder or
rape. Louisiana is not
the exception in
this regard. Rather, it is typical
, and these 20 are just the tip of the iceberg. Louisiana List |
A
couple who became fugitives in 1984 following accusations that they
abused their 4-year-old daughter left jail feeling vindicated after
prosecutors
dropped the charges, but said their lives had been ruined. Edward
and
Karri LaBois fled Minnesota with their daughter 19 years ago after the
abuse
accusation was made. They were arrested Nov. 10 when an informant
tipped
police that they were living in a Salt Lake City suburb. Sex Abuse Witch
Hunt Scam |
The biggest
"stars" converged on Adams County, PA in 1987 to convict Barry Laughman
of murdering his elderly relative, Edna Laughman. State Trooper
Jack Holtz --who took $50,000 from author
Joseph Wambaugh for information on the case against Jay Smith, framed
for a murder he didn't commit-- got Barry, who is retarded, to
"confess" by saying "yes" to whatever Holtz suggested. Then crime
lab chemist Janice Roadcap came up with the fanciful theory that
antibiotics Edna was taking at the time of her death changed Barry's
blood type from B to A, the killer's blood type. Holtz and
Roadcap
were exposed as frauds while Barry remained in prison. UPDATE: Barry Laugman Released from
Prison
For
the first time in more than 16 years, Barry Laughman of Hanover, PA is
surrounded by family and friends rather than bars, guards and other
inmates.
The DNA that freed him was tracked down by investigative reporter Pete
Shellem of the Harrisburg, PA Patriot News. A
Life Regained |
The
Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the State of Ohio to
release or retry Wyman Castleberry because the Franklin County
Prosecutor’s Office and the Columbus Police Department hid evidence of
Mr. Castleberry’s innocence. Black Mark
on Franklin County, Ohio |
In Boston, MA, Shawn Drumgold walked
out of jail after Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Rouse vacated his
conviction, saying "justice was not done" at his 1989 trial and that
the "system had failed." 15 Years for
Someone Else's Crime |
Congress
is intensifying its
probe into FBI misconduct, with the powerful House Judiciary Committee
now planning its own national examination of the way FBI agents handle
criminal informants. Hopefully, they'll look at
the case of Pasquale Barone, Jr. His brother-in-law was forced to
commit perjury, naming Barone the killer of his own best friend.
When notified in a police memo of the recantation, the US Attorney not
only hid the memo from defense attorneys, he forged a new memo and
forced the witness
to lie under oath. Barone is free, but
Still
Under a Cloud |
Terry Harrington embarked on his new
life on October 24, 2003, free after serving 25 years of a life
sentence and always maintaining his innocence. He is a Free Man . |
After
more than 20 years behind bars,
Calvin
Willis
was set free Friday after DNA tests showed he did not rape a
10-year-old girl. Louisiana does not compensate the wrongly
convicted. It's A Slap in the Face
|
Jimmy "Spunk" Williams, 32, was freed from prison after 10 years when a woman recanted testimony identifying him as the man who raped her when she was 12 years old. He agreed Monday to a $750,000 settlement. The state also will pay about $84,600 in fees to two lawyers. Ohio's Largest Award for Wrongful Conviction |
In a plot twist few involved could
have imagined, the Baltimore County state's attorney's office now
believes the killer in the 1984 slaying has been hiding behind bars
since a month after the crime. Kirk Bloodsworth was arrested, convicted and sentenced
to death. His sentence was overturned in 1987, but he was convicted
again and given life without parole. After his
pardon and release -- his was the first DNA exoneration in this country
of
someone who had been on death row -- a growing cadre of supporters
urged Baltimore
County prosecutors to use the same scientific technology to try to
identify
the true killer. What Took So Long?
|
Thirteen years ago, when he was a
homicide detective, San Francisco Police Chief Earl Sanders hid
evidence the John Tennison and Antoine Goff were innocent of killing
Roderick Shannon -- the real killer's confession. Tennison and
Goff went to prison; Sanders' duplicity helped take him to the top of
the heap. Now a federal judge has overturned those convictions
and
pinned the blame squarely where it belongs. John Tennison and
Antoine Goff |
After 17 years in prison - most of it
seeking DNA tests to prove his innocence - Lonnie Erby walked free on
August 25th because genetic testing conclusively showed he had not
committed two of the three rapes for which he was convicted. His
exoneration came despite strenuous opposition by Circuit Attorney
Jenniver Joyce, who argued the DNA testing would cause
unnecessary upheaval for victims and their families and unneeded
expense. All three victims picked him out of a line up. Lonnie Erby |
California's
2nd Appellate District Court has overturned Jose Salazar's
murder conviction in the death of Adriana Krygoski. That
conviction
was based on the testimony of LA Dep. Coroner James Ribe, who claimed
that
"shaken baby" injuries -- in this instance, intracranial bleeding --
could
be accurately "timed" and therefore used to identify the
assailant.
This "theory" has been discredited by medical science.
Web of Deceit |
A divided Nevada
Supreme Court has reversed the the murder convictions of Sandy Murphy
and Rick Tabish. They had been found guilty of killing Las Vegas
casino executive Ted Binion, despite the fact that medical experts
testified Binion, a know heroin addict, died of an overdose of heroin,
Xanax and Valium. They will get a New
Trial . |
Thanks to the efforts of the
Innocence Project New Orleans, Gregory Bright and Earl Truvia have been
released after over 27 years in prison for a murder they did not
commit. They are Innocent Men . |
In 1981, Eddie Lowery was a young
soldier stationed at Ft. Riley, Kansas. Interrogated for hours,
he finally confessed to raping a 74-year-old woman. Eddie served
10 years of a sentence of 11 years to life and was
released on parole. Now, 21 years later, Eddie has been Cleared by DNA. |
Kenneth Wyniemko of Mt. Clemons, Michigan served 9 years of a 60 year sentence for rape and robbery before he was cleared by DNA testing. He has been freed, at last. Macomb County Prosecutor Carl Marlinga, moved to tears, declared, " I want people to know this man is Absolutely Innocent ." |
Christopher Conover
, 48, of
Towson, Maryland, spent 18 years
behind bars for two murders. He has been freed following DNA
tests that prove two hairs found at the crime scene and used against
him at trial weren't his after all. |
In 1984, a coerced false
confession and perjured jailhouse snitch testimony sent Dennis
Halstead, John Kogut and John Restivo to prison for 30 years for
the rape and murder of a Long Island, NY teenager. DNA tests in
the
early 1990's excluded them, but was rejected as "unreliable" by the
court. New DNA tests not only excluded them, but identified the
assailant. The state still won't admit they are innocent, but
they have been Set
Free . |
In 1991, Rick Walker of Santa
Clara County, CA was convicted of murder,
thanks to an amoral trial prosecutor willing to trade truth for a deal
with
a liar and a near-vegetative defense attorney. Thanks to a dogged
defense attorney and an honest prosecutor, Rick has been freed and
declared
Factually Innocent . |
Dana Holland, 35,
was freed after a Cook County judge found him not guilty in a retrial
on the 1993 attempted murder and armed robbery of a woman in Chicago. Holland
had been linked to that crime by a wallet found at the scene that had
belonged to another woman, a rape victim. Holland was originally
convicted of that rape, but DNA evidence exonerated him of it earlier
this year. He had been sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for
both crimes and served 10 years. The
victim of the attempted murder testified against Holland again at his
retrial, identifying him in court. Eyewitnesses
Rarely Concede Error |
More than a
quarter-century after they were sent to prison for one of the most
sensational crimes of the 1970s, two Chicago men, Michael Evans and
Paul Terry, walked free into the arms of tearful relatives and a
dramatically different world after prosecutors agreed they should have
a new trial. Prosecutors will retry them, although DNA has excluded them
. |
The past several years have been full of high legal drama
for Glen "Buddy" Nickerson as he and his lawyers have relentlessly
pursued his release from state prison for a double murder he said he
never committed. He finally got the freedom he'd been looking for
when the Santa Clara district attorney's office announced it would not
retry Nickerson for the 1984 slayings of two San Jose drug dealers.
Free after 19
Years |
After 11 years in prison, DNA has
cleared Michael Mercer of raping a 17-year-old girl. The victim
saw Mercer 2 months after she was attacked and identified him as her
assailant. She
was certain, but she
was wrong |
In February, 2002, ten years
after Timothy Brown and Keith King were sent to prison based on coerced
confessions to the 1991 murder of a Broward County Sheriff's Deputy,
another deputy confessed to the killing. (See The Real
Killer has Confessed ) The killer subsequently
recanted, but even after Timothy Brown's confession was thrown out, the
State of Florida refused to let him go. Finally, 15 months later,
an innocent man has been freed -- and a killer remains on the loose.
"I'm
Finally Going Home" |
Eighteen years after he was sent
to death row for a 1984 murder, John Thompson of New Orleans, LA has
been found not guilty by a second jury. Now he
is a Free Man
|
The
Missouri Supreme Court has overturned the conviction of death row
inmate Joseph Amrine, who had claimed he was innocent of killing
another prisoner 17 years ago. The Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision,
said Amrine had shown "clear and
convincing evidence of actual innocence that undermines confidence" in
his
conviction. Update: Joseph Amrine
released from
prison .
|
In 1983, in Lowell, MA, two rape
victims identified Dennis Maher as their assailant. For 19 years,
Dennis protested his innocence. DNA tests
have confirmed his innocence and he has been freed. 126th DNA Exoneration |
|
|
A federal judge has
thrown out a murder conviction against Timothy Brown, a retarded man,
in the 1990 killing of a sheriff's deputy. The ruling eliminated a confession the judge called "the
only meaningful evidence" against Brown, who was 15 at the time of the
killing, and had a mental age of 7 or 8. The Real Killer has
Confessed |
Jonathon Kaled and
Frank Kuecken The Long Road Home Coerced Confessions - A Close Call - A Tragic Ending |
In 1998, a rape victim identified
Josiah Sutton as one of her assailants when she saw him on the street,
and the Houston, Texas crime lab claimed DNA
tests implicated him. The crime lab has been shut down because of
the
poor quality of its work, and new DNA tests have excluded
Josiah.
4 1/2 Years in Prison -- for Nothing |
A 1981 Philadelphia,
PA murder case is not unusual. Two pair of men confessed to it.
The pair that didn't do it -- one spoke no English,
the other has an IQ of 60 to 65 -- spent 20 years in prison for it.
Felix Rodriguez and Russell Weinberger |
Two days after a fire broke out
at Woodgrains Furniture in Albert Lea, MN, an insurance investigator
removed an extension cord from the scene. The female end of the
cord was suspected to have caused the fire, but it disappeared.
Then owner Bryan Purdie was charged with arson and -- guess what
-- insurance fraud. But it was the insurance company that
perpetrated the
fraud, and after an exhaustive 26-month battle, the Arson Case has been
Dismissed . |
Over 21 years ago, a rape victim
in Hampton Roads, VA saw Julius Ruffin
on an elevator and insisted he was her attacker. After two
mistrials, he was convicted at a third trial and sentenced to five life
terms. Now he has been Cleared by DNA .
|
When Diomedes Polonia was charged
with robbery and attempted murder, he
turned down a New York Legal Aid lawyer and paid $5,000 to a private
attorney
whose incompetence got Diomedes convicted. Five years later, two
young
attorneys working pro bono have obtained his freedom. You Don't Always Get
What You Pay For |
The
Missouri Supreme Court has overturned the convictions of Danny Wolfe,
sentenced to death for a double murder six years ago near the Lake of
the Ozarks.
``This court's confidence in the fairness of the trial and the
reliability of Wolfe's conviction is seriously undermined,'' Judge
Richard Teitelman wrote
for the state's highest court, which reversed the convictions and
ordered a new trial. Danny
Wolfe |
Rudolph Holton
spent more than 16 years on Florida's death row for a crime he did not
commit. On January 24, 2003, Mr. Holton became the 23rd Florida death
row inmate to be exonerated since 1973, and the fourth Florida death
row inmate exonerated in the last 25 months. Another Death Row
Inmate Exonerated |
In Texas in 1997, facing a deadlocked jury, Wesley Ronald Tuley pleaded guilty rather sit for another trial and the possibility of life in prison if convicted. Then his accuser recanted her allegations. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has ruled that Innocence Supercedes Guilty Plea |
Four
Chicago Men Framed for Murder Exonerated Omar Aguirre, Luis Ortiz, Duarte Santos and Robert Gayol |
After a night out with
his buddies, James Andros, III, a veteran police officer, the son of a
police captain, calls 911 to say his young wife is dead. The medical
examiner rules the death a homicide — asphyxia by suffocation — and the
husband is charged with killing his wife, his childhood sweetheart.
Facing a life sentence, he loses his job and his children, and finds
himself vilified by neighbors and the news media. Brutal wife killer?
No. Botched
Autopsy. |
Jeffrey
Scott Hornoff Exonerated and Freed In His Own Words :
Scott Hornoff speaks out
about his fellow officers, the media, prosecutors and more.
REINSTATED : On 1/6/04, RI Superior Court Judge Joseph Rogers wrote, " An innocent man should not have spent six years in jail for a crime he did not commit, and an innocent man should not be burdened by a wrongful conviction." With that, Judge Rogers ordered Scott reinstated to the Warwick RI Police Department, with back pay and benefits. UPDATE: Scott was reinstated (and resigned), but all the back pay went to attorney's fees and child support arrears that accumulated while he was in prison. Scott's Autobiography: WithPrejudice |
Milwaukee, WI Convicted
of murdering her husband's ex-wife, cleared in the court of public
opinion, Bambi is still running to prove her innocence once and for all.
|
Ray
Krone Phoenix, AZ |
Henry Roberts
(Dec'd.) Baltimore, MD |
Akron, OH |
Sacramento, CA |
Prison is Now a Memory February 7,
2004: Lawyers representing Earl Washington in his lawsuit against
the Culpeper, Virginia police who orchestrated his conviction for the
brutal 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Williams have gathered evidence
"including the identity of the convicted rapist whose DNA was
identified in the semen mixed with the victim's bodily fluids on the .
. . blanket on which she was stabbed and sexually assaulted; his
criminal history; circumstantial evidence of his motive and opportunity
to commit this crime; and admissions by him". Yet Virginia
authorities have no intention of prosecuting
Ms. Williams' killer, and have kept the evidence under seal to protect
themselves. Release of slaying-case decision is sought
|
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Michael
Piaskowski Green Bay, WI |
Philadelphia, PA |
Montgomery Co., PA |
Boston, MA |
Chicago, IL |
Brooklyn, NY |
Richmond, IL |
Linden, NJ |
Alexandria, VA |
Los Angeles, CA |
Gilmer, TX |
Springfield, MO |
Pima Co., AZ |
Harris Co., TX |
Austin, TX |
New Caney, Texas |
Harris Co., TX |
Oliver Springs, TN |
Columbus, OH |
Joe
Kennedy Greensboro, NC |
George
Lindstadt Suffolk Co., NY |
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Austin, TX |
Boston, MA |
Boston, MA |
Cambridge, MA |
Vancouver, WA |
Couer D'Alene, ID |
Toledo, OH |
Decatur, AL |
Falls Village, CT |
San Jose, CA |
Miami, FL |
Boise, ID |
Lehigh Co., PA |
Cleveland, OH |
Baltimore, MD |
Richmond, VA |
Dallas, TX |
Hanover Co., VA |
South Bend, IN |
Jessup, MD |
Lakeland, FL |
Harrisburg, PA |
Steelton, PA |
Memphis, TN |
Cleveland, OH |
Houston, TX |
Chatom, AL |
Queens, NY |
Lynwood, CA |
St. Louis, MO |
Louisville, KY |
Detroit, MI |
Billings, MT |
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