The Georgia Supreme Court today in a 4-3 opinion denied death row inmate Troy Davis an evidentiary hearing allow him to present evidence of his innocence. You can read the opinion here (pdf.) Some background here:

Troy Davis was sentenced to death for the murder of Police Officer Mark Allen McPhail at a Burger King in Savannah, Georgia; a murder he maintains he did not commit. There was no physical evidence against him and the weapon used in the crime was never found. The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony which contained inconsistencies even at the time of the trial. Since then, all but two of the state's non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony. Many of these witnesses have stated in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis.

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his testimony is Sylvester "Red" Coles – the principle alternative suspect, according to the defense, against whom there is new evidence implicating him as the gunman. Nine individuals have signed affidavits implicating Sylvester Coles.

Amnesty International responds to today's decision:

Claude McCollum was convicted of raping and murdering a woman in Lansing, Michigan. After about three years behind bars, prosecutors (to their credit) admitted that "new evidence" cast doubt on McCollum's guilt, and facilitated his release from prison.

Now "new evidence" establishes that the prosecution probably, and the police certainly, had reason before McCollum's trial to question his guilt. As the result of McCollum's lawsuit, police and prosecutors are pointing fingers at each other while claiming their own conduct was blameless.

A police detective told prosecutors more than two months before trial that surveillance tapes showed Claude McCollum could not have killed Carolyn Kronenberg, newly filed court documents claim. That claim by Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. James Young contradicts statements by prosecutors that they didn't learn of the evidence until McCollum's 2006 trial.

Young says he told Ingham County Assistant Prosecutor Eric Matwiejczyk in November 2005 that he thought McCollum was innocent, based on video recordings showing McCollum to be elsewhere when the murder was committed. According to Young, Matwiejczyk "responded that an LCC mathematics professor had discredited how the detective calculated times that McCollum was seen on a surveillance video in a different building than where the murder happened." The unidentified math professor has yet to surface, and Matwiejczyk's claim that he gave Young's report to the defense right before Young testified is contradicted by defense lawyers, who presumably would have used it to shred the prosecution's case had they known of it.

Two men in Mississippi, wrongfully convicted of murdering a child, have been released from prison after a decade, thanks to the work of the Innocence Project and local lawyers.

The cause of these wrongful convictions: fraudulent evidence. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project says:

"You have a local forensic dentist who fabricated evidence in both these cases to get two innocent men convicted."

Here's more from the Innocence Project on the clearing and release of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks.

In both cases, the real perpetrator has now been apprehended.

Update: Radley Balko at Reason has an update on Mississippi's woeful forensics system.

Bump and Update: Tim Masters was freed from prison today, 9 1/2 years after his conviction for a murder he did not commit.

Lots more below.

Nick Yarris, released from jail four years ago after spending 22 years in prison having been sentenced to death for a murder he didn't commit, has settled his wrongful conviction case against Delaware County, PA for $4 million.

The settlement was the result of a malicious-prosecution lawsuit Yarris filed in 2004 against Delaware County and the law enforcement officials who investigated and prosecuted him, and it came as the case was moving closer to trial in U.S. District Court.

[His lawyer John] Beavers said county representatives agreed to inform the family of murder victim Linda Mae Craig that "no probable cause existed to believe Nick Yarris had anything to do with her death."

Yarris now lives in London where he is a stay at home dad to his 21 month old daughter.[More...]

[Bump (Jeralyn): This got lost with all our election coverage and it's important.]

Texas leads the nation in executions by a wide margin. It should therefore be concerning that Texas appears to lead the nation in wrongful convictions.

Since 2001, DNA tests have exonerated at least 30 wrongfully convicted inmates in Texas, the most of any state, according to the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal clinic that seeks to uncover wrongful convictions.

Another victim of a bungled Texas prosecution, Charles Chatman, is expected to be released today after serving more than 26 years in prison for a rape that he has always denied committing. He was convicted after the complaining witness picked him from a photo array -- a notoriously unreliable identification procedure. DNA testing established his likely innocence.

Remember Wisconsin "political prisoner" Georgia Thompson, whose conviction was reversed by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals drawing questions about the U.S. Attorney's handling of the case?

The State Claims Board has ordered the state to repay her $228,000 in costs and legal fees.

She was wrongfully imprisoned for four months.

Chad Heins, aqe 33, imprisoned for 14 years for a rape and murder he did not commit, has been freed from prison in Florida. He is the ninth DNA exoneration in Florida and the 210th DNA exoneration nationwide. The Florida Innocence Project says:

On Tuesday December 4, 2007, at the Fourth Judicial Circuit Court in Jacksonville, Florida, the Fourth Circuit State Attorney officially dropped the murder and attempted rape charges against Chad Heins in light of results of DNA testing which conclusively prove his innocence. After fourteen years of enduring the torture of wrongful incarceration and the humiliation of being convicted of murdering his sister-in-law, Tina Heins, Chad Heins gained his freedom in time to return to his family in Wisconsin for Christmas.

More...

A Tennessee jury has found Michael Lee McCormick not guilty following a retrial of his murder case. McCormick spent 15 years on death row.

The New York Times has a feature article on the struggles of exonerated to rebuild their lives after years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Here's the story of Jeffrey Deskovic.

There are 400 exonerees and the number keeps growing. When you're making your holiday donations this year, I hope you consider Life After Exoneraton and The Innocence Project.

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Last year, TalkLeft called attention to the serious questions surrounding the convictions of three teenagers -- dubbed the "West Memphis 3" by the media -- for the gruesome murders and mutilations of three 8-year-old boys. In a court filing yesterday, defense attorneys raised those questions.

[A]ccording to long-awaited new evidence filed by the defense in federal court on Monday, there was no DNA from the three defendants found at the scene, the mutilation was actually the work of animals and at least one person other than the defendants may have been present at the crime scene.

An HBO documentary, Paradise Lost, and a follow-up documentary highlighted the problems with the case against the defendants. Court documents and considerably more information about the case can be found at this website.

Bump: Because this needs more attention and we've blogged so much the past day it already fell off the front page.

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Via USA Today:

Since 2006, the Justice Department has yet to spend any of the $8 million set aside by Congress for DNA tests for convicts to prove their innocence while it has used $214 million to collect DNA from convicted criminals and improve crime labs, records show.

"DNA evidence is such a powerful tool in proving guilt or innocence that it's inexcusable not to use it," says Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chief sponsor of a bill to provide more funding for what is known as innocence testing. If spent, the $8 million could affect dozens of cases, says Barry Scheck, a defense lawyer who specializes in using DNA to overturn convictions.

I'm not surprised, given DOJ's opposition to the Innocence Protection Act all along. By the time the bill was passed, it was stripped of the most meaningful protections and turned into a victims' rights bill, even being renamed The Justice For All Act.

So today we learn, according to the National Institute of Justice (the DOJ's non-partisan research arm that administers the funds) the reason even the paltry (by comparison) $8 million isn't being spent is a deficiency in the law.

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