A man hanged in Britain in 1950 has had his conviction quashed. Three London judges ruled the conviction "unsafe" becasue the prosecution had withheld a statement from one of their witnesses that an accomplice who had been tried and acquitted later confessed to committing the murder for which George Kelly was hanged.

The conviction had been obtained solely on circumstantial evidence with no forensic support. Do you really think this hasn't happened here?

Meet Rick Walker, age 47. Mr. Walker has just been released from a California prison after serving 12 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit. An auto mechanic,
Walker was convicted of murdering a former girlfriend based upon accomplice testimony. The man police believe is the real culprit is now in custody.

Snitch testimony is inherently unreliable when it is purchased with promises of leniency or freedom. It makes our system morally bankrupt.

On a more positive note, the Santa Clara DA's office, through spokesman Karyn Sinunu, is very apologetic and it appears Mr. Walker may be eligible for compensation.

All wrongfully convicted inmates should be compensated for the time they unjustly serve in prison. Tell Congress to pass the Innocence Protection Act.

From Rough Justice: An interview with Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld in the June 6 issue of The New Scientist:

The US criminal justice system needs an overhaul to make it more scientific, more reliable, and ultimately more just. That's the view of lawyer Peter Neufeld, famous for his role as part of the defence team in the OJ Simpson murder trial. In 1991 Neufeld co-founded the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to free the wrongly convicted. It has mushroomed into a civil rights movement and spawned numerous similar projects around the world. Rachel Nowak visited Neufeld in New York to find out what criminal justice can learn from science.

On the Number of Exonerations:

Since we started post-conviction DNA testing in the US, 130 people have been exonerated in total, including 12 people who had been languishing on death row. The Innocence Project was counsel for about 65 per cent of them.

On False Confessions:

The Innocence Project was involved in the case of the Central Park jogger in which five teenagers were exonerated of rape after serving up to 12 years in gaol. They had all admitted to the crime...

That was extraordinary because they even had their parents in the room part of the time. But the police are very good at what they do. In this country they are allowed to use trickery during the interrogation. You tell people, "Your buddies have already told us you did it. We're going to make you the heavy unless you tell us that you were on the sidelines and that it was really your buddies that did it." And they go, "OK. I'll give you that." Twenty-five per cent of our cases involve false confessions. In other countries, they require the entire interrogation, not just the confession, to be tape-recorded, but not here.

On What Else Needs Changing:

The way identifications are conducted. When the victim looks at line-ups or photo arrays, studies indicate that if the perpetrator is not in the group, the victim will make a relative selection. She will say to herself: who among these six pictures looks most like the fellow who assaulted me? One way to remedy that is to show one picture at a time, or in line-ups to make one person come out at a time.

There's lots more, so go read the whole thing.

DNA is not foolproof. Why? Because the testing isn't always done correctly. William Thompson is one of the leading skeptics--It's not like CSI in real life, mistakes are made, you can't always trust a positive match.

In March, a 21-year-old Texas man serving a 25-year sentence for a 1998 rape was released from prison after Thompson's review of DNA evidence in the case. Prosecutors argued at trial that Josiah Sutton's DNA was a 1-in-694,000 match with the rapist's. It took a jury just two hours to convict him. In fact, Thompson was able to show that Sutton's DNA wasn't found in any of the police samples.

None of this surprised Thompson, an attorney who also has a doctoral degree in psychology.

Although cases of innocent people falsely convicted by bad DNA evidence are rare, Thompson sees ambiguous results, sloppy lab work or overstated findings in a quarter of the cases he examines.

Madison Hobley is one of the four inmates pardoned by former Illinois Governor George Ryan before he left office. Hobley spent 16 years in prison for arson and murder, 13 of them on death row.

Hobley has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Chicago police, alleging that they tortured and framed him.

...detectives were accused of beating Hobley and placing a plastic bag over his head to cut off his air supply in an unsuccessful effort to get him to confess.

Hobley alleges detectives manufactured a confession, though he said he never confessed, planted a gas can at the scene and lied at Hobley's trial.

The prosecutors said Hobley wanted to kill his wife and son so he could be with a girlfriend. But the case had been marked by problems. The Chicago police detective who said Hobley confessed to him later testified he threw away his notes when he spilled coffee on them and they got wet and torn.

An arson investigator's initial report indicated the fire started on the ground level of the building. The alleged confession had Hobley saying he started the fire outside his third-floor apartment. Then, at the trial, the detective said the fire could have started anywhere. In addition, one key witness has recanted, and the Tribune found police reports suggesting another key witness was given help by police.

The Commander of the South Side police precinct, Jon Burge, has since been fired--for the torture of another inmate.

Burge was fired by the Chicago Police Board in 1993 for his role in the torture of Andrew Wilson, who was being questioned in the murders of two police officers. Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death, but his conviction was overturned.

From the Chicago Tribune :

More than a quarter-century after they were sent to prison for one of the most sensational crimes of the 1970s, two Chicago men walked free into the arms of tearful relatives and a dramatically different world Friday after prosecutors agreed they should have a new trial.

Citing DNA tests that excluded Michael Evans and Paul Terry in the 1976 rape and murder of 9-year-old Lisa Cabassa, Cook County prosecutors dropped their opposition to a new trial, though they plan to try the two men again.

....Evans and Terry were sentenced to 200 to 400 years in prison for the abduction, rape and murder of Lisa on Jan. 14, 1976. The girl was abducted as she walked near her home in the South Chicago neighborhood. Her body was found the next day.

At the time, Evans and Terry were 17.

If prosecutors do not try Evans and Terry or if the two men are acquitted, the case would be the oldest DNA exoneration in the nation, said Rob Warden of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Winning a conviction would seem difficult in the face of the DNA evidence and the numerous contradictions in Januszewski's testimony, lawyers for the men said.

Evans also called on prosecutors to drop the case. "They know they were wrong," he said. "They need to let it go."

A New York man, Michael Mercer, who has spent the past 11 years in prison for rape has been freed through DNA testing proving his innocence.

Cause of conviction: the teenage victim's "insistent identification" of the inmate as the rapist. The real perpertrator: a repeat felon serving two life prison terms. The Manhattan DA's office made the request to free Mercer.

Understatement of the year: In freeing Mercer, the Judge said, ''Obviously a terrible mistake was made.'' Obviously, there are no words to adequately address the needless waste of 11 years of their life. Money would help. New York does have a law allowing wrongfully convicted persons to obtain compensation. All states should have one. The federal government should withhold federal funds from states that refuse to enact such a law.

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What do the wrongfully convicted get in Florida after being exonerated? Would you believe $100.00 and a bus ticket?

Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee petitioned the state 19 times over two decades seeking compensation for the dozen years they lost as innocent men in prison, nine sitting on Death Row. Each time, conservative Republicans and old-South Democrats slapped them down.

When the men finally got their money, $500,000 apiece, Pitts was so frustrated that he didn't show up at the obligatory ceremony with lawmakers to mark the event. Inmates who are exonerated by DNA testing, cleared by prosecutors, released by judges, even pardoned by the governor are not automatically entitled to compensation under Florida law for their years of wrongful imprisonment -- as they are in more than a dozen other states.

When the wrongly convicted walk out of prison in Florida, they get $100 and a one-way bus ticket. This kind of treatment should no longer be tolerated. Particularly in Florida with its high rate of exonerations.

No such law exists in Florida, a state with some of the most notorious cases of wrongful conviction. Vindicated men and women are left with two sobering options: Persuade a lawmaker to file a bill seeking compensation in the conservative state Legislature, or file a civil lawsuit seeking damages.

'It shouldn't be that every time someone is exonerated, we should have to go and make a personal plea before a state legislature,'' said Morrison of the Innocence Project. ``We have a moral obligation to help them. It should be a law.''

The states, of course, won't be passing such bills any time soon with their budget crises. It's another reason we need to pass a federal Innocence Protection Act--hopefully it will have a provision for the "government to mandate that federal Department of Justice money be withheld from any state that doesn't have a system on the books compensating the wrongfully convicted."

LA Weekly is featuring Taryn Simon and The Innocents--highly recommended. The Innocents recounts 46 stories of exonerations from wrongful convictions. It is,

a collaboration of Simon, a 28-year-old photography wunderkind, and the Innocence Project, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck’s New York–based effort that employs DNA testing to free the wrongly convicted. In the 11 years since its founding, the project has helped secure the release of 127 men and women. All 45 men and the one woman featured in The Innocents were freed with the help of the project, which provided some funding for the book as well as case narratives and a brief opening commentary by Neufeld and Scheck.

But the bulk of the work for the book fell to Simon. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she spent three years crisscrossing the country, interviewing and photographing the book’s subjects, whose wrongful convictions occurred in 18 different states, from California to Kentucky, Texas to Indiana.

Here's more.

Bump and Update: We're glad to see this is still in the news--3 days running now. Here's today's article.

Here's more from NPR on the The Innocents, a new book by Taryn Simon that tells the stories of people wrongly imprisoned for years before proving their innocence.


Buy the Book Today!

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Originally posted May 9:

The Innocence Project and the DNA Identification Technology and Human Rights Center of Berkeley, Calif., are forming a much needed new project to assist exonerated prisoners after their release from jail.

"We were getting all these people out of prison, but we found most of them were having tremendous difficulty with life on the street," said Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which provides legal assistance to prisoners seeking to prove their innocence through DNA testing.

The Life After Exoneration project will create a national network to provide support services such as "housing assistance, job training and mental health services" to the newly exonerated.

To date, $75,000 has been raised to fund the initial phase of the project, which will inlude " evaluating the exonerated to determine the services they need and recruiting social service agencies from across the nation to participate in the project. "

An additional $300,000 to $500,000 will be needed "to get the project up and running. "

Michael McAlister is serving a 35 year prison sentence in Virginia for attempted rape. He says he is innocent. The prosecutor and detective in his case agree. But he can't get a hearing. Why? Because Virginia doesn't allow claims of innocence based on new evidence to be made more than 21 days after sentencing unless the claim is based on DNA. There is no DNA in McAlister's case.

"Ninety percent of convictions don't involve biological evidence, but the same mistakes happen," said McAlister's attorney, Christopher Amolsch. "Mr. McAlister is a prime example of why we need to go back in front of a judge to prove claims of actual innocence."

McAlister's case and recent DNA exonerations have cast a spotlight on an emerging criminal justice issue: questionable or even faulty eyewitness identifications. In the 17 years McAlister has been in prison, DNA testing has cleared 127 people nationwide and seven in Virginia. Mistaken eyewitness testimony was to blame for most of the errors.

Julius Ruffin spent 21 years in a Virginia prison in a rape cape. Marvin Anderson served 15 years in another Virginia rape case. Bernard Webster was behind bars in Maryland for 20 years. In each case, DNA set the wrongly convicted men free; mistaken eyewitness testimony was what got them convicted.

This month, a Massachusetts man who spent 19 years in prison in a series of sexual assaults was cleared by DNA. Three women had identified him as their attacker.

Unless the Governor grants McAllister's petition for clemency, he will stay in jail.

After spending 19 years in prison for 3 rapes, DNA evidence has proven Dennis Maher factually innocent of the crimes. He left jail today.

A man who spent 19 years in prison after three rape victims identified him as their attacker was freed Thursday based on new DNA evidence, but said he doesn't blame the women whose testimony helped put him behind bars.

Dennis Maher, 42, said he had a message for the women after prosecutors dropped the charges at a hearing at Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge: "What happened to you really happened, and I hold no grudges against you."

Maher, a former paratrooper and mechanic in the U.S. Army, said he blamed Lowell police and his former attorney, now deceased, but was too overwhelmed by his newfound freedom to feel any anger about his years of incarceration.

"It's a big change," Maher said during a press conference at the Boston office of his attorneys. "I expected to die in prison ... and now I'm out."

Maher is the 127th inmate to be exonerated and freed through DNA testing. You can read about his case and how he came to be wrongfully convicted here.