2006 Innocents in Prison News & Views

Click Headline for Full Story

December 2006

OKLAHOMA

And Justice For None - The Life and Death of an Innocent Man

You have read John Grisham's book, now read the rest of the story.

(PRWEB) -- And Justice For None - The Life and Death of an Innocent Man by Mary Ann West gives a new and personal view of this story that became the lynchpin case in how DNA evidence changed the face of forensic science in criminal trials. (The State of Oklahoma, Plaintiff, vs. Ronald Keith Williamson and Dennis Leon Fritz - Case No. CRF - 87 - 90). . . . In 1988, two men, one a former professional baseball player and the other a high school math teacher, were arrested, charged and tried for the rape/murder of a twenty-one year old woman in a sleepy Oklahoma town five years after this woman's death in 1982. The only evidence against these men was hair - eleven hairs that were determined to be similar to those of these men, but the town wanted someone arrested and the prosecutor wanted a resolution to this five-year old case. These men were convicted. The former baseball player received the death penalty and was five days from execution by lethal injection when a federal judge granted a stay and prefaced his decision by the following statement: "While considering my decision in this case, I told a friend, a layman, I believed the facts and law dictated that I must grant a new trial to a defendant who had been convicted and sentenced to death. My friend asked, 'Is he a murderer?' I replied simply, we won't know until he gets a fair trial. God help us if we turn our heads while people who have not had fair trials are executed. That almost happened in this case." . . . The teacher was given life without parole and they spent twelve years in prison before this new science freed them and finally, in July of 2006, convicted the man whose testimony convicted them.

GEORGIA  

Georgia Man Fights Conviction as Molester

By Shaila Dewan

12-19-06 -- Genarlow Wilson, 20, is serving a prison sentence that shocked his jury, elicited charges of racism from critics of the justice system and that even prosecutors and the State Legislature acknowledge is unjust. . . . He was sentenced to 10 years in prison without parole for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year’s Eve party, an offense that constituted aggravated child molesting, even though Mr. Wilson himself was only 17. . . . With Mr. Wilson — a football player, honor student and the first homecoming king at Douglas County High School — nearing two years in prison, the Georgia Supreme Court declined last Friday to hear his appeal. . . . Mr. Wilson, who is black, is trapped in a legal vise intended to ensure severe penalties for child molesters and other sex offenders, navigating a maze of legal technicalities that for him seems to hold nothing but dead ends. Some critics of the sentence also say Mr. Wilson is caught in a system that metes out disproportionately harsh sentences to black defendants. . . . Disturbed by Mr. Wilson’s conviction, the Legislature changed the law in March to ensure that most sex between teenagers be treated as a misdemeanor. But the State Supreme Court said legislators had chosen not to make the law retroactive.

Order justice under righted sex law
OPINION By Maureen Downey, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The legal system must stop offering Genarlow Wilson condolences and start giving him justice. . . . Sentenced last year to 10 years for consensual oral sex with a classmate two years his junior, Wilson saw his prospects for freedom dashed last week when the Georgia Supreme Court declined to take up his case. . . . Because he was 17 and the girl was 15, Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation, which carries a mandatory 10-year prison sentence. A year after Wilson's conviction, the Legislature rewrote the sex offender law in recognition of the inherent unfairness of criminalizing sexual behavior between two consenting high school students. . . . Now, consensual oral sex is a misdemeanor rather than a felony if the victim is at least 13 and the suspect is no more than 4 years older, but not older than 18. It carries a maximum sentence of only 12 months. . . . But the Legislature did not speak to teens jailed under the old draconian law, a fact that the high court says tied its hand in Wilson's appeal.

MASSACHUSETTS

Ex-Springfield mayor testifies in false-imprisonment case

By Dan Ring

12-20-06 -- Former Springfield Mayor and state Parole Board member Michael J. Albano yesterday testified that the FBI never provided him with information that three men convicted of murder were innocent. . . . "To the contrary, no information was provided to show their innocence," Albano testified yesterday in a civil trial in U.S. District Court in Boston in which two men and the families of two deceased men are suing the government for more than $100 million for wrongly putting the men in prison. . . . Two of the men - Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone - were in prison for more than 25 years before a judge tossed out their convictions in January 2001. They were exonerated after secret FBI documents were released indicating that the bureau knew the men were innocent but helped set them up to protect an informant who actually committed the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan in Chelsea outside Boston.

TEXAS  

Lawyer Sues Judge Alleging False Imprisonment

New York Lawyer, By Mary Alice Robbins, Texas Lawyer

12-20-06 -- A Sherman, Texas attorney who alleges that 336th District Judge Lauri Blake had him removed from her courtroom in Fannin County and detained in a holding cell has sued Blake for false imprisonment. . . . In his original petition filed Dec. 5 in the 336th District Court, solo David Stagner alleges that on July 29, 2005, he failed to show up for a hearing in a divorce case, because he had requested a jury trial and assumed that the case had been removed from the court's nonjury docket. Later that day, Blake summoned Stagner to her courtroom and ordered him to go to the district court's office to pay the jury trial fee. . . . According to a hearing transcript attached to Stagner's petition in David M. Stagner v. Laurine J. Blake, Stagner was attempting to have an exhibit that showed he had already paid the fee marked for identification as evidence, when Blake ordered him to give the exhibit to the bailiff. [See the plaintiff's original petition and request for disclosure.]

US judge asks FBI why information withheld in civil trial

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff  

12-14-06 -- A federal judge ordered the Justice Department last night to ask FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to explain why the bureau has refused to share crucial information with the government's own lawyers, disrupting the civil trial being held on behalf of four men who were wrongly imprisoned for decades. . . . US District Judge Nancy Gertner wrote that the FBI's position is "chilling," given that the suit brought on behalf of Peter Limone , Joseph Salvati , Henry Tameleo , and Louis Greco is about informant abuse and FBI agents allegedly "hiding the ball" by withholding information that would have helped exonerate the four men in a 1965 gangland slaying. . . . She ordered the Justice Department to notify Mueller of her concerns and report back by Monday on why she should not find the government in contempt and impose punitive fines. . . . Gail Marcinkiewicz , a spokeswoman for the FBI in Boston, said the case was being handled out of Washington and "because it's an ongoing matter, we can't comment on it." . . . A Justice Department spokesman could not be reached last night for comment.

MASSACHUSETTS

Walpole man is awarded $400k for wrongful arrest

12-12-06 -- A Walpole man wrongfully arrested for the brutal 1998 murder of a 75-year-old relative was awarded $400,000 yesterday by a US District Court jury in Boston, which found that the trooper who arrested him had violated his rights. . . . For Edmund Burke, 56, who spent 41 days in jail for the slaying of his sister-in-law's mother, Irene Kennedy of Foxboro, the long-awaited verdict meant vindication. . . . "It took a long time for true justice to be achieved for Ed Burke," said Robert Sinsheimer, his Boston-based lawyer. "We're grateful that 12 conscientious citizens could see the truth. . . . This jury said he was wronged. No one has ever said that before formally." . . . The jury found that Trooper Stephen McDonald violated Burke's rights because he knew of DNA evidence clearing the suspect before arresting him in December 1998, nine days after Kennedy was beaten, strangled, and repeatedly stabbed in Walpole's Bird Park.

VIRGINIA  

Inmate uses petition for rare chance to clear name in murder case

By Michelle Washington, The Virginian-Pilot

12-04-06 -- In the world of law, judges put a premium on finality. . . . Asking a judge to overturn a conviction or to reopen a case is asking for a new beginning, said Mary Kelly Tate, the director of the Institute for Actual Innocence at the University of Richmond law school. . . . "You're asking for something quite extraordinary," Tate said. . . . That's why a judge's decision last week to vacate Derek E. Tice's convictions for murder and rape and to declare his imprisonment unlawful is so unusual. . . . Tice was convicted of the 1997 killing of Michelle Moore-Bosko, an 18-year-old whose body was found by her husband in their apartment when he returned from a Navy deployment. . . . Tice was one of eight men charged in the crime. Charges against three men were withdrawn for lack of evidence. The five men convicted all made confessions to police. Of those, Tice and three others say their confessions were coerced and have appealed to the governor for clemency. The fifth, Omar Ballard, was the only suspect to be linked to the crime by DNA and now says he acted alone. . . . Tice succeeded in court by using a legal petition called a writ of habeas corpus, filed last year. It's a Latin term that means "you have the body," and it's often addressed to the prison warden. In his petition, Tice claimed that his convictions were invalid because of witness tampering by police and prosecutors, mistakes by the trial judge and ineffective assistance of counsel.

ILLINOIS  

Judge sets in motion wrongfully convicted man's release

By Sophia Tareen

12-01-06 -- A Cook County judge agreed Thursday to release a man serving a 20-year-prison sentence for a 1992 rape that DNA tests showed he didn't commit. . . . "That's not justice," Circuit Judge Stanley Sacks said of Marlon Pendleton's imprisonment. "It's an injustice." . . . Sacks vacated Pendleton's sentence and ordered him released on a personal recognizance bond for a separate sexual assault for which he's already served his full prison term, setting in motion a release from prison that might come as early as Thursday. . . . Pendleton appeared stunned by the judge's ruling, dropping his head and covering his face with his hands _ the moment, his attorney said, when it hit him he was going to get out of prison. . . . "He's been in prison for over a dozen years," said attorney Karen Daniel. "He's lost a huge chunk of his life, he's lost his family. He doesn't have any money, he doesn't have a job. It's not a happy day for Marlon Pendleton." . . . Sacks set another hearing for Dec. 8, at which time the Cook County State's Attorney's Office will likely drop the case, spokesman John Gorman said.

MASSACHUSETTS

Lawyers: wrongful conviction statute mired in bureaucracy

Process to recover compensation seen as slow

By David Frank

Nearly two years after its enactment, the state's wrongful conviction compensation statute is bogged down by bureaucratic red tape and needless delays, lawyers complain. . . . Particularly when dealing with convictions overturned by DNA, practitioners note that unnecessary discovery battles and requests by the government to further investigate claims have unjustly slowed down the process. . . . In fact, in the 2005 case of Stephen Cowans, his lawyer — Robert N. Feldman of Boston (who declined to comment for this story) — became so frustrated with the system that he brought the matter to the court's attention. . . . According to a letter in Cowans' case file, Feldman wrote that because his client had already received public apologies for his wrongful conviction from Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley and acting Police Commissioner James J. Hussey, the government's request for a second extension was unfair. . . . "In light of these public comments, it is difficult to understand why there is a need for additional time to confirm Mr. Cowans' claim of innocence," Feldman wrote. "By April 7, 2005, your office will have had Mr. Cowans' initial pleadings for six weeks. Now you seek an additional thirty days and your office inexplicably has moved to have Cowans' case taken off the 'expedited' track to which it was assigned. All of this is unacceptable under the unique circumstances of this case." . . . Feldman's frustrations have been felt by others handling cases under the statute. . . . "It may be just a product of the statute being new, but there has been a feeling that it's taking longer than it should to get these cases resolved," said Joseph F. Savage Jr., chairman of the New England Innocence Project. "I'm sure the AG's Office feels they're moving as fast as they can, but from the perspective of the wrongly convicted guy, it shouldn't take a minute to decide that they've got to pay, so any delay has to make you wonder why it's taking so long."

November 2006

OREGON  

U.S. to pay $2M, apologize for false terror arrest

 STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Brandon Mayfield settles his false arrest suit against the government
• The Oregon lawyer will receive $2 million and a written apology
• Mayfield was falsely accused of taking part in the 2004 Madrid train bombing

From Henry Schuster and Terry Frieden
(CNN) -- 11-29-06 --An Oregon lawyer wrongly arrested and accused of involvement in the 2004 Madrid train bombings has settled a lawsuit against the U.S. government for $2 million, attorneys told CNN on Wednesday. . . . Brandon Mayfield was arrested in Portland, Oregon, on a material witness warrant in May 2004, less than two months after the train bombings. . . . The settlement was confirmed by both sides. It was reached Tuesday during a conference with a federal judge, attorneys said. . . . The FBI identified Mayfield's fingerprint on a blue plastic bag containing detonators found in a van used by the bombers. However, the FBI's fingerprint identification was wrong and Mayfield was released several days later. . . . Mayfield and his family later sued the U.S. government for damages. The Portland-area attorney contended that he was a victim of profiling because he is a Muslim convert.

PENNSYLVANIA

Statewide panel to study ways to prevent wrongful convictions

Martha Raffaele, Associated Press

11-27-06 --A special committee will examine the cases of Pennsylvanians who were convicted of violent crimes, but later exonerated by DNA or other evidence, in a study intended to find ways to prevent wrongful convictions. . . . State Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf, R-Montgomery, said Monday the advisory committee on wrongful convictions is one of a series of measures he has advocated in recent years to balance tougher criminal penalties with measures ensuring that only the guilty are convicted. . . . Greenleaf, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored a resolution that the Senate adopted Tuesday to create the advisory committee. He also sponsored a 2002 state law giving inmates wider access to post-conviction DNA testing. . . . "Now that people are using this, we're finding people on death row and otherwise who have been mistakenly convicted of crimes," Greenleaf said. "All too often, we forget that justice is also served when the innocent are acquitted." . . . In an article published earlier this year, John T. Rago, a professor who heads the Innocence Project at Duquesne University Law School, discussed the cases of eight former state inmates who were cleared by post-conviction DNA testing. A ninth was freed at around the time the article appeared in the Widener Law Review. . . . "What that gives us is the perfect little laboratory" to determine what went wrong, Rago said.

NEW YORK  

In Murder Case, New Evidence but Same Cell

By Jim Dwyer

11-16-06 -- More than two years ago, investigators from the Queens district attorney’s office sat in Jaime Acevedo’s living room and listened to him describe a night in 1992 — an instant, really — that has yet to end. . . . Mr. Acevedo, seen by the authorities as an ordinary, law-abiding, working man with no reason to lie, said that he knew the inside details on a little-noticed murder in Woodside, one that seemed to have been solved and settled long ago. . . . Investigators had never spoken with Mr. Acevedo or realized that he knew anything about the case. But in fact, Mr. Acevedo told them, he had unwittingly given the killer a ride to and from the murder scene. The man he named had never been connected or charged with the crime. . . . There was more. . . . Mr. Acevedo said the one person accused and convicted of the murder had nothing to do with it. That man, Joshua Rivera, sentenced to 37 years, had not even been present, according to Mr. Acevedo. . . . The story did not end there. The district attorney’s investigators found another man who told essentially the same story as Mr. Acevedo: he, too, said that he had been in the car with the killer and that Mr. Rivera was not involved.

Trial to weigh cost of being framed

Cash compensation sought for lost years

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff  

11-13-06 -- When small-time hoodlum Edward "Teddy" Deegan was gunned down in a Chelsea alley on March 12, 1965, the FBI had a pretty good idea who did it. . . . Agents knew from an illegal bug that notorious hitman Joseph "The Animal" Barboza and FBI informant Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi had sought permission from the boss of the New England Mafia to kill Deegan, according to FBI reports. And other informants named Barboza, Flemmi, and two other men as Deegan's killers, according to FBI memos. . . . But the case took a dramatically different turn when the FBI recruited Barboza to testify in a series of Mafia-related trials under a deal that gave him leniency for his own crimes. He admitted his role in Deegan's slaying and implicated others -- but not Flemmi -- leading to the wrongful convictions of four men who spent decades in prison before they were exonerated. . . . In a lawsuit that could cost the government more than $100 million in damages if it loses, lawyers allege the FBI sat on documents that would have helped those four men prove they were framed by Barboza. The suit is scheduled to go to trial Thursday in US District Court in Boston. . . . Peter Limone, now 72, and Joseph Salvati , 74, who were each in their early 30s with four children when convicted in 1968, spent more than 30 years in prison. Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo died in prison before being vindicated.

Ex-Death Row Inmate Krone Speaks to The Sun

By Molly OToole, Sun Staff Writer

11-13-06 -- The Sun interviewed Ray Krone, who was released from the Arizona state prison in 2002, after being wrongly convicted of sexual assault and murder. Krone was brought to Ithaca last week by the Cornell Death Penalty Project, to speak at the law school. . . . On April 8, 2002, Ray Krone walked out of the Arizona state prison in Yuma where his family and friends, as well as the media, greeted him. To his loved ones, Krone was an important man. But to the media, he was an important number — the 100th death row inmate freed because of innocence. . . . Thus, in his first precious minutes of freedom after 10 years, Krone answered questions. . . . “How did you survive?” one reporter asked. . . . Krone replied he had survived by holding on to the truth; that those who mattered most, knew his innocence — himself, his family and friends and God. . . . Another reporter questioned, “Given your faith in God, how do you justify his leaving you in prison for 10 years?” . . . Krone was speechless. He questioned the purpose of his experience. For what was maybe the hundredth time in those 10 years he asked himself, “Why me?”

TEXAS  

As innocent man freed, lawyer criticizes system

Dallas: Police say eyewitness policies reformed since wrong conviction

By Robert Tharp / The Dallas Morning News

11-01-06 -- First the judge apologized, then the prosecutor. Finally, after 25 years in prison, 58-year-old Larry Fuller triumphantly walked out of the courthouse Tuesday a free man. . . . "There's no bitterness," he said. "This is what life is about – trial and tribulation." . . . But outside the courtroom, those who worked five years to secure the DNA testing that would prove his innocence had harsh words for the Dallas County justice system. They demanded that Mr. Fuller's exoneration become more than just the latest case of DNA testing righting a legal wrong from a generation ago. . . . With 10 such exonerations in the last five years, Dallas law enforcement should undergo a critical self-examination and embrace tighter standards when relying solely on eyewitnesses, said lawyer Barry Scheck, co-director of the national Innocence Project. . . . "Every time a case like Larry's occurs, we have to learn a lesson," Mr. Scheck said. . . . But police and prosecutors say they understand that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and that they no longer operate under the practices that resulted in Mr. Fuller's wrongful 1981 rape conviction and 50-year prison sentence. . . . Dallas police have volunteered to be a test city to try out progressive new eyewitness identification techniques recommended by the Police Executive Research Forum. The proposed changes have been delayed until grant funding occurs, police officials said. . . . Mr. Scheck also asked that prosecutors review the 10 recent exoneration cases to determine how they occurred and make sure the same mistakes are not repeated.

October 23, 2006

ILLINOIS  

Award to DNA-freed man

City to pay $1 million over false confession
City officials agreed Tuesday to pay $1 million to a Hyde Park man whose DNA exoneration helped persuade state lawmakers that police should videotape interrogations--and not just confessions--of murder suspects. . . . Corethian Bell, 30, confessed on videotape to murdering his mother in 2000 but was exonerated 17 months later when DNA evidence linked another man to the crime. . . . In a lawsuit filed in 2002, Bell said he confessed only because police held him for more than two days and that, at one point, a detective struck him on the head. . . . Bell also was vulnerable because he suffered from mental illness and mild mental retardation, the lawsuit stated.

Jury awards $9 million to man cleared of rape by DNA evidence

Associated Press

A federal jury awarded $9 million Tuesday to a 33-year-old man who spent four years in prison before DNA evidence cleared him of rape charges. . . . "It's a day for justice," said Jon Loevy, an attorney representing Alejandro Dominguez in a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Waukegan and a now-retired police lieutenant. .. . . Dominguez was 16 years old when he was convicted of a 1989 home invasion and rape in Waukegan and sentenced to nine years in prison. He served half that before being released in December 1993 with time off for good behavior. . . . DNA tests eventually showed Dominguez could not have produced semen recovered from the victim, and a judge overturned his conviction in 2002. He was pardoned by the governor in August 2005, officially clearing his record.

October 17, 2006

MASSACHUSETTS

DNA truth-seeking

GLOBE EDITORIAL

DENNIS MAHER was a brutal serial rapist, until he wasn't. In 1984, the Lowell mechanic was convicted of three sexual assaults, attacking one victim at knife point and punching another into submission. Two victims identified him and two juries convicted him; his appeals failed. But in 2003, after Maher had spent 19 years in prison, the juries, victims, prosecutors, and judges were proven wrong when DNA evidence exonerated him. . . . With all the talk in the gubernatorial campaign decrying support of DNA testing for certain felons, Maher's story is worth remembering. It is a reminder that our justice system is not perfect, and sometimes demands that a convicted rapist get a second look (or a third or fourth look, in Maher's case).. . . But in Massachusetts, it is tougher for the wrongly convicted to set those wheels of justice in motion, because Massachusetts is one of just a handful of states -- along with Alabama and Mississippi -- still lacking laws giving inmates access to testing of DNA evidence. . . . Massachusetts has seen nine convictions overturned based on DNA evidence; it cannot afford to postpone passing such a law any longer. . . . Three bills have been filed in the Legislature. They should be combined into legislation reflecting the best aspects of the laws in other states.

October 9, 2006

 For Grisham, a new turn into non-fiction

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

John Grisham's downtown office in this quaint college town is packed with 12-inch-high stacks of court documents, box after box of medical records and hundreds of photographs. . . . They are part of the paper trail that tells the story of Ron Williamson, a once promising ballplayer who spent 11 years on Oklahoma's death row for a rape and murder he did not commit. It might have been the whole story of Williamson's life — until Grisham read his obituary in December 2004. . . . Grisham found Williamson's real life just as compelling as the stories he has told in his hugely successful legal thrillers. "It just had everything," Grisham says. "A wrongful conviction, the near execution, the exoneration, the mental illness, the insanity, the baseball." . . . Grisham, 51, was so taken by the Ada, Okla., native's story that it has changed the course of his career. The author of 18 best-selling novels has now written his first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (Doubleday, $28.95), on sale Tuesday.

MASSACHUSETTS   

Judge rules Sarsfield deserves $13.6M for wrongful conviction
By Jennifer Kavanaugh/ Daily News Staff
 Seven months after the city settled a wrongful rape conviction lawsuit for $2 million, a federal judge ruled this week that Eric Sarsfield deserves $13.6 million for the decade he spent in prison. . . . Wednesday's ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel doesn't change the $2 million settlement the city reached with Sarsfield in March, but it does give Sarsfield's lawyers the option to chase after other parties, to the extent they exist, for the rest of that money. . . . The judge's decision comes almost four years after Sarsfield first sued the city and several police officers over his 1987 conviction for a rape he did not commit. She wrote that Sarsfield's "social and communal life has been shredded" by his conviction and incarceration. . . . "It is, of course, impossible to make plaintiff whole and to give back to him his lost liberty, the time he lost from ordinary life, and his emotional and physical health," Zobel wrote in her decision. "Translating such losses into dollars is, at best, an attempt at reasoned judging."

Eric Sarsfield info on The Innocence Project

MARYLAND

A question of innocence

OPINION – Baltimore Sun

James Owens Jr. believed he would die in prison. Sentenced to life without parole for a rape-murder, he saw no other future - until last week, when a DNA test cast serious doubt on his conviction in the 1987 slaying of a young Southeast Baltimore woman. . . . The testing, opposed by prosecutors and delayed by a judge, supports claims of innocence by Mr. Owens and his co-defendant, James Thompson Jr., who is serving a life sentence. It reaffirms the potential of this technology to identify innocence - and guilt - and underscores why requests for post-conviction DNA testing should be handled swiftly and judiciously. . . . The integrity of the judicial system and the search for the truth depend on it. . . . Although Maryland has one of the more progressive laws in the country on post-conviction DNA testing, it took lawyers for Mr. Thompson and Mr. Owens nearly 18 months to win approval to test semen found at the scene of the robbery and stabbing of 24-year-old Colleen Williar. Baltimore prosecutors opposed the testing, in part because Mr. Thompson had confessed at trial to being present at the murder, which he said was done by his friend, Mr. Owens. After sitting on the DNA motion for a year, a judge denied it in late 2005 and then changed her mind a month later after more review.

NEW YORK

If DNA is Nobel-worthy, so is innocence

NY Daily News

The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday, but there is little chance it will go to two truly deserving New Yorkers, the two being Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project. . . . For all the knuckleheads who have taken up the old street chant "No justice, no peace," the essential truth remains: There truly can be no peace without justice. . . . And nobody of late has done more for the cause of justice than the nonprofit outfit that Scheck and Neufeld founded in 1992 with the noble notion of using DNA evidence to free the wrongly imprisoned. . . . The most immediate and vital result of the Innocence Project's work has been the freeing of 183 souls who never should have been jailed in the first place. These include a Bronx man who was freed in June after serving 22 years for a rape he did not commit, a Peekskill man who was freed in September after serving 16 years for a rape and murder he did not commit and a Brooklyn man who was freed last week after serving 21 years for a rape he did not commit. . . . Scott Fappiano was ordered released Friday in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Scheck was out of town due to a previous commitment, but he used a wonderful word to describe the hearing. . . . "I couldn't be at the exoneration," he said.

Innocent man freed after 16 years, guilty man confesses

KARE11 -- Steven Cunningham knew it would come out someday. But for almost 17 years, he kept a secret from relatives, friends and law enforcement - a silence that sent a naive teenager to prison for more than half his life for a crime Cunningham committed. . . . In a jailhouse confession yesterday, the 46-year-old convicted murderer admitted that he killed 15-year-old Angela Correa in the woods behind Peekskill's Hillcrest Elementary School in November 1989 - four years before the slaying of a schoolteacher would land him behind bars. . . . "I strangled her," he told The Journal News of Correa. "It was during (sex). Like a rage." . . . Two weeks ago, Correa's Peekskill High School classmate, Jeffrey Deskovic, was released from prison after a DNA match linked Cunningham to the crime. The inmate insisted yesterday that he had no idea anyone was ever charged or sent to prison for his crime, and that if he had, he would have spoken up sooner. . . . But Deskovic, now 32 and staying with a friend in Peekskill until he finds an apartment, said it was unfathomable that someone who remained in town in the wake of Correa's high-profile slaying would have been oblivious to the outcome of the investigation.

October 5, 2006

PENNSYLVANIA

Court lets innocent inmate sue

Federal judges refused to throw out the case of a man wrongly jailed 22 years.

By Emilie Lounsberry, Inquirer Staff Writer

A federal appeals court has refused to throw out a civil-rights lawsuit brought by former Pennsylvania death row prisoner Nicholas Yarris, who spent 22 years behind bars until after a long-sought DNA test cleared him of a Delaware County rape and murder. . . . Yarris, now 45 and living in England, sued Delaware County after his 2004 release, contending that prosecutors and detectives destroyed evidence pointing to the real killer, manufactured evidence against him, and thwarted his demands for DNA testing. . . . The lawsuit is one of a growing number of suits filed across the country by defendants who were freed as a result of DNA testing after spending years in prison. . . . Prosecutors and detectives had sought dismissal of the suit under the long-recognized legal principle that prosecutors and investigators should be immune from lawsuits as long as they act in accordance with the law when they prosecute someone. . .. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in a decision filed Monday, said that the prosecutors "are not entitled to absolute immunity from suit for constitutional violations caused by their alleged deliberate destruction of exculpatory evidence."

September 28, 2006

DNA Tests Prove Justice Has Failed
Alberto Cremonesi

(IPS) - When we talk of capital punishment there is no room for mistakes; no allowances for doubt or indecision. There is definitely no mechanism for review of guilt or innocence after someone has been killed. . . . Yet, consider these people:
Jeffrey Mark Deskovic, 33, spent nearly half his life in a New York prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. DNA testing cleared Deskovic and he was released Sep. 20 from prison.  . . . "I was supposed to finish out my education…begin a career," Deskovic, choking up, told reporters when leaving the court room. "Marry, have a family, spend some time with my family…share the last years of my grandmother's life with her." Deskovic was 17 years old when he was ordered to spend his life in prison. . . . In 2004, Ryan Matthew, convicted for the murder of a local convenience store owner in Louisiana, escaped the death penalty after prosecutors dropped all charges on the basis of DNA testing results.  . . . There are other stories of executions conducted too fast, trials completed too quickly and mistakes too easily made. And yet, the state-sanctioned killings continue. Now, DNA testing is helping to prove that innocent people continue to be killed or placed on death row. It proves that the U.S. judicial system is flawed; it sends innocent people to jail and, worse, puts them to death.

PENNSYLVANIA

Bill could help put an end to wrongful convictions

By Ray Krone

In an important move toward improving the criminal justice system in Pennsylvania, the state Senate in April unanimously passed The Innocence Commission Act . . . . The legislation (Senate Bill 1069), introduced by Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Montgomery, with a bipartisan group of co-sponsors, would establish the commission to study the reasons why innocent people are convicted of crimes. . . . SB 1069 now awaits action in the House Judiciary Committee. Several representatives from south-central Pennsylvania are members of that committee, and I strongly urge them to ensure that the bill finds its way out of the committee and to the full House for a vote.

VIRGINIA

Exonerated man awaits legal reversal of rape convictions

By Duane Bourne, The Virginian-Pilot
Arthur Lee Whitfield, who was exonerated for two 1981 rapes by DNA evidence, remains on the state's sex offender registry because his convictions have not been legally overturned by a court or the governor. . . . The question arose Monday when The Virginian-Pilot accompanied a state trooper on Operation Vigilant Locator, which aims to find 300 sex offenders who have not provided current employment information to the state registry. . . . Whitfield was among 160 people on the registry who provided law enforcement agents with updated information Monday.

September 26, 2006

NEW YORK  

DNA Exonerates Westchester Man Convicted In 1990 Rape And Murder

District Attorney Consents To Have Newly Developed  DNA Test Performed On Evidence

Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore will join in a motion today to vacate the murder conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic (DOB 10/27/73) of Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York based on evidence made possible by new DNA testing secured by the District Attorney’s Office.

On November 17th, 1989, the strangled, beaten and partially nude body of fifteen year old Angela Correa, a Colombian émigré, was found in the woods near the Hillcrest Elementary School in Peekskill, New York. She was last seen on November 15th, 1989 when she left home to take pictures for a photography class.

On December 7th, 1990, sixteen year old Jeffrey Deskovic, a Peekskill High School sophomore and classmate of the victim was found guilty of felony murder, rape in the first degree, criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree and depraved indifference murder after a jury trial. Although DNA testing available at that time, Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) was able to develop a profile which excluded Jeffrey Deskovic as the donor, no test existed that could identify the donor.

Deskovic was sentenced to fifteen years to life for the murder, eight and one third to twenty five years to life for the rape and one year for possession of a weapon, all sentences to run concurrently.

Earlier this month, the Innocence Project, on behalf of its client Jeffrey Deskovic, requested that biological evidence collected at the scene of the crime be retested by Short Tandem Repeat (STR), a test not available in 1990.

The District Attorney’s Office consented and a subsequent search of the profile in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) came up with a “hit” and matched another individual who is currently serving a life sentence in the New York State prison system.

District Attorney Janet DiFiore commented, “Nothing protects the integrity of the criminal justice system more directly than the expectation of fairness. As prosecutors we vigorously and aggressively prosecute the guilty, and the foundation that gives us the moral as well as legal ability to do so is that we just as vigorously protect the rights of the innocent. If and when new technology allows us the opportunity to exonerate the innocent as well as convict the guilty it is our duty to do so.

Jeffrey Deskovic will be immediately released based on the vacate order.

Last year, in the United States, there were eighteen exonerations based on DNA evidence.  

TEXAS

Man freed after 12 years in prison

Associated Press

9-21-06 -- A man granted a new trial after serving 12 years in prison was freed after the murder charge against him was dropped. . . . The El Paso District Attorney's Office dismissed the charge Monday because of inadequate counsel in the first trial and a lack of physical evidence connecting Alejandro "Alex" Hernandez to the murder of Robert A. Cobb, a homeless man who was stabbed and beaten to death with a steering column lock in 1994. . . . Earlier this summer, a state appellate court overturned Hernandez's 1994 conviction and ordered a new trial. The court ruled that Hernandez's attorney failed to exploit inconsistencies in the testimony of a witness and did not call to the stand a second man who would have testified that his roommate confessed to the murder. . . . There was no physical evidence linking Hernandez to the crime, and subsequent DNA testing could not establish a link, said Renee Railey, a spokeswoman for the district attorney.

September 18, 2006

PENNSYLVANIA

After 22 years on death row, Nick Yarris has a new start on life.

John Roman, Of the Times Staff

After spending nearly half his life on Pennsylvania’s death row, ex-con Nick Yarris -- cleared through DNA tests in the 1981 rape-murder of an Upper Chichester woman -- has had nearly 32 months to start a new life. . . . He now calls England his home. He’s been living overseas the past two years with his wife, Karen, and their newborn daughter, Lara Rebecca. . . . It’s a life he never dreamed of after being diagnosed in prison with hepatitis C and serving 22 years behind bars while awaiting execution. It was 8,057 days of living hell he’ll never forget. . . . Yarris, 45, a native of Southwest Philadelphia, was not only the first person convicted of murder to request unprecedented DNA testing (in 1988) in both Delaware County and Pennsylvania, but also in the United States, he says.

September 12, 2006

Defendants' Web Sites Make Their Lawyers Squirm

By Peter Geier, The National Law Journal

Gregory Wright has spent the last decade as a death row inmate in Texas, as the sole perpetrator of a murder for which another man later was convicted. . . . Or so say Wright's wife and supporters on the newly launched Web site,