In August we wrote of newly exonerated Wilton Dedge, freed from prison after serving 22 years for a rape he didn't commit. The St. Petersburg Times today reports on his case from beginning to end, and on his life since his release. Dedge just turned 43. He tries not to be bitter:

Dedge says he's trying not to focus on how wrong the justice system treated him. Like his parents, he believes it best to live in the moment.

"I don't want to have a bad attitude. It's there in the back of my mind, but I don't want to dwell on it right now. I'm having too much fun with new things. "I'm very, very disappointed. There's anger there. But I can't dwell on anger or I'll mess up my life. I'm trying to enjoy things instead of dwelling on anger."

His lawyers have enough bitterness for both of them. One of them, Milton Hirsch of Miami, calls the prosecutors' actions in Dedge's case, "moronic," "monstrous, shameful" and "Orwellian."

"When Wilton got out, he was pleased and forward-looking and capable of not dwelling on the bitterness of the past. But when it occurs to me that some prosecutors got up the next day and put on their pants and go to work and prosecute the next Wilton Dedge defendant with no consequences and no change in the criminal justice system, I can't get past that."

Congrats to the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project, based in Salt Lake. Bruce Dallas Goodman is expected to be released from prison today after serving 19 years for a rape and murder conviction vacated by new DNA evidence.

by TChris

Last month, TalkLeft reported the release of Ernest Willis from death row in Texas, where he spent 17 years for a crime he didn't commit. A sharply written story in San Antonio's Express-News exposes the grim details of this tragic injustice.

The state of Texas had prosecuted him with scant and flawed proof. It had tried him while he was unknowingly drugged — hence the eerie, vacant gaze in court. And, after all that, it wanted him dead.

This compelling report of Willis' wrongful conviction concludes in tomorrow's Express-News.

by TChris

Sexual assault accusations made by small children are often uncritically accepted -- by social workers, police officers, prosecutors, and juries. The conventional wisdom is that young kids lack a sufficient knowledge base from which to invent a story about sexual activity, and that they never have a motive to lie.

That unfortunate attitude deprived Sylvester Smith of twenty years of his life. Only now is the truth being told.

The victims, who were 4 and 6 when they made the charges, testified that they falsely accused Smith, 53, who was the boyfriend of one of the girls' mothers. One victim said that the real abuser was a cousin who was 9 at the time. She said their grandmother, who has since died, pressured them to accuse Smith rather than the boy, [District Attorney Rex] Gore said.

The younger woman said she concealed the truth for the last two decades because she was afraid she wouldn't be believed. The other woman said she decided to recant now because "I wanted to get something off my chest."

Credit the current district attorney for admitting that his office made a mistake twenty years ago, and for asking the court to dismiss the charges and to set Smith free. Smith had been serving two consecutive life sentences.

The case was prosecuted in 1984 by Mike Easley, who was just reelected as the Governor of North Carolina.

by TChris

A mentally disabled janitor spent nine years in prison after being convicted of three murders. David Allen Jones was released in March after being cleared of the crimes. DNA evidence points to Chester Turner as the true killer. In fact, Turner may have been responsible for the murder of a dozen Los Angeles women between 1987 and 1998.

by TChris

The good news for those accused of crimes in Boston is that they are less likely to be victimized by bad science: the Boston Police Department is shutting down its inept fingerprint unit.

[Stephen] Cowans spent six years in prison after the unit wrongly matched his print with a fingerprint from a glass mug found at the Egleston Square crime scene where Officer Gregory Gallagher was shot and wounded in 1997.

The two fingerprint examiners responsible for Cowans' wrongful conviction were placed on administrative leave. The error was blamed on a lack of training and standards, although a contributing factor appears to be the unit's institutional desire to make the facts fit the theories conconcted by investigating officers.

"I have never seen anything but problems with the Boston fingerprint lab," said [fingerprinting analyst James] Starrs, who worked for Cowans' defense team. "I've never seen quality work from them. ... They're police sergeants, not scientists, doing the work. That's a serious problem, because they don't have the scientific standards to abide by."

The state police will do the unit's work until it hires and trains competent individuals who are willing to place science ahead of preferred outcomes.

Over half his life has been spent in prison for a rape he didn't commit. At 36, Dennis Brown is free for the first time since he was 17 when he was charged and convicted of raping a woman at knifepoint in her home. New DNA tests have excluded him as the perpetrator. What convicted him? Faulty eyewitness testimony.

During a trial in September 1985, the victim testified she was certain Brown raped her. "I had his face this close," she testified, holding her hand less than 6 inches from her face, "for at least 20 minutes, and he's the man."

Brown denied the attack when he took the stand in his own defense, against his attorney's objection. He told the jury the police investigators were lying and that the first time he set eyes on the victim was in court. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Brown protested his innocence for years and the Innocence Project took up his case.

Under a statute passed in 2001, lawyers from the group secured a court order to test any evidence preserved by police in Brown's case. DNA tests of blood, semen and clothing found at the scene excluded Brown as the rapist.

Brown says he never lost faith, he knew he'd eventually be freed. He's now home.

His brother, Archie, hugged him for the first time in nearly two decades and drove him home, first stopping for foot-long shrimp po-boys.

Today, Ernest Willis, age 59, was ordered released from a Texas prison after serving 17 years for a crime he did not commit. Faulty arson investigation techniques may have contributed to Willis' conviction.

Ori White, district attorney in Pecos County since 1997, said Tuesday that there were strong indications the fire was an accident. There was no motive in the case, and a close relative of Willis' was barely able to escape the burning home. Even if a crime was involved, White said, "I don't think the man is guilty."

Willis is the 8th Texas prisoner to be released from death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1974. Here's more on his case.

Rob Warden, the Director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, writes a compelling article in today's Chicago Sun Times on federal prosecutors' reliance on snitch testimony to convict and the resulting injustice from a practice which best is summed up as:

''Don't go to the pen -- send a friend'' and ''If you can't do the time, just drop a dime.''

As an example, he uses the upcoming bribery trial of former Illinois Governor George Ryan, who two years ago emptied the state's death row due to the number of factually innocent inmates placed there. Warden begins with:

Chicago is embarking on a pilot project to reform police lineups. Lineups will now use double-blind testing--meaning the officer won't know which of the persons in the lineup is the one suspected of committing the crime. The second big change is that lineups will be conducted sequentially--the witness will only view one person or photo at a time.

Both of these measures have been shown to reduce the error rate in eyewitness identifications. If every jurisidiction would adopt these reforms, and require mandatory taping of interrogations, the wrongful conviction rate would tumble.

Police should be encouraged to seek these changes in their departments. If the wrong man is in prison, the guilty one is still out there roaming, ready to strike again.

What happens to children who falsely accuse adults of sexual abuse when they grow up? Some, like Ed Sampley, try to make amends. Sampley was one of five kids who accused John Stoll, then a 41 year old carpenter of sexual abuse. Stoll got 40 years in jail.

Last January, Sampley and three other former accusers returned to the courthouse where they had testified against Stoll. This time they came to say Stoll never molested them. They are in their late 20's now. They have jobs in construction, car repair, sales. A couple of them have children about the same age as they were when they testified. Although most of the boys drifted apart after the trial, their life stories echo with similarities. Each of them said he always knew the truth -- that Stoll had never touched them. Each said that he felt pressured by the investigators to describe sex acts. A fifth accuser isn't sure what happened all those years ago but has no memory of being molested.

The article, in Sunday's New York Times magazine, is seven pages. Unfortunately, the hysteria may be cyclical.

...discredited child-sex rings like McMartin actually may not be a bogeyman of the past. Some parents, therapists and child-protection professionals continue to believe ritual sex abuse took place at McMartin preschool. ''In 10 to 15 years, there will be an attempt to rehabilitate the ritual abuse scare,'' [Univ. of Texas psychologist Wood says. ''You can bet on it.''

Sampley still feels guilt over his false testimony:

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

The University of Cincinnati's Center for Law and Justice is being awarded a $1 million endowment from local benefactors Lois and Richard Rosenthal. The gift will be announced today at the start of Innocence Week. Other events include a speech by attorney Barry Scheck, a member of the O.J. Simpson defense team, and the local opening of the play The Exonerated.

The Center for Law and Justice, to be renamed the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Institute for Justice today, was founded at the University of Cincinnati in 2002. The institute approaches many social-welfare projects in the city but is best known for the Ohio Innocence Project started in 2003, which seeks to exonerate wrongly imprisoned inmates by using new information and new technologies such as DNA identification.

"The Innocence Project is truly a passion we have," said Lois Rosenthal. "When you are of (financial) means, you can hire careful representation. But when you are poor or not knowledgeable about the law, you are not represented as well."

At the performance of the Exonerated today, talk-show host and former Cincinnati mayor Jerry Springer will read one of the roles.