Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld call for an end to the DNA debacle and for the creation of an independent committee to review questionable cases.

Neufeld and Scheck, based in New York City, are cofounders and directors of the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit legal clinic devoted to freeing the innocent.

"For Josiah Sutton, the Houston man released from prison last week after DNA tests concluded he could not have been the rapist prosecutors said he was, there would be no more football heroics, no prom or graduation, no shot at a gridiron scholarship. But thanks to the momentum to reopen old criminal cases, generated by a burgeoning scandal in the Houston Police Department crime lab, there may be a future."

Josiah's story is one we are hearing far too often.

Sutton was arrested Oct. 30, 1998, five days after a woman had been taken at gunpoint from her southwest Houston apartment, raped by two attackers and dumped in a field in Fort Bend County.

Sutton, who was 16 at the time, was walking down the street with a friend when the woman, driving past in her car, identified them as her assailants. She would later testify that she recognized them by their hats, which looked like the ones worn by the men who raped her.

Once charged with kidnapping and rape, Sutton and his friend submitted saliva and blood for comparison to material recovered from the attack. DNA tests conducted by the now-discredited HPD lab ruled out Sutton's friend as one of the rapists but included him.

At his trial, an HPD analyst testified that DNA from the rape was an exact match for Sutton, who turned 17 in jail while awaiting trial. But new tests of the samples have found the DNA of two unidentified men, neither of whom could be Sutton.

At 17, here are some of the things he witnessed and had to learn to be prepared to defend himself against, according to his mother, Carol Batie:

In the early months of his incarceration, Sutton faced a difficult adjustment to the Clemens Unit in Brazoria.

"This was a (teenager) physically defending himself against men," Batie said. "He witnessed another inmate getting his throat slashed. He saw the guy lying on the ground kicking, dying before his eyes.

"He saw another prisoner die after he was thrown over a railing. These are not things my child should have been watching."

Sutton served 4 1/2 years before being released last week. He had been captain of his high school football team and on his way to earning a football scholarship for college when he was arrested. He had attracted the interest of college scouts in his sophomore year. What's ahead for him now?

Sutton, who already has a GED, wants to go to school. He would like to revive an old talent that earned the family extra cash when he was a teen, cutting hair, and may one day open his own barbershop. After he walked out of the jail, Sutton declared, "I am looking for success, period."

The Houston Chronicle has full and excellent coverage the Houston crime lab scandal, including today, an article about a prosecutor's shaken faith in the system, and another on the increased use and precision of DNA testing .

The family of a black maid who killed in self defense and was convicted after a one day trial by an all white jury in the Segregated South in 1944 with no witnesses called on her behalf is seeking her exoneration.

Lena Baker claimed that she was being held against her will by a drunken white man and acted in self-defense when she wrested his gun away and shot him.

....Now relatives of the only woman executed in Georgia's electric chair are returning to Cuthbert to honor Baker and try to clear her name with the state Board of Pardons and.

"The family doesn't need to go down in history with a bad name," said Roosevelt Curry, 59, the grandson of Baker's brother.

...After she was sentenced, her attorney filed an appeal, but it was dropped after he withdrew from the case. She was executed in March 1945.

John Cole Vodika, director of the Prison and Jail Project, an inmate advocacy program, said the family has a strong case for getting her exonerated.

"She should never have been tried for murder," he said. "It was an obvious injustice. That's what the system did with African Americans who dared resist white men's authority.

"She was a victim of racism, white man's domination over African American women," he said. "In an effort to cover up what really happened, the county moved to treat it as capital murder. It sure appears they wanted to get rid of her quickly and to limit or eliminate anything happening that would further embarrass the family of the deceased."

Baker, who had a sixth-grade education, proclaimed her innocence to the very end. "What I done, I did in self-defense," she said in her final statement. "I have nothing against anyone.... I am ready to meet my God."

There will be a memorial service for Baker on May 11 at the Mount Vernon Baptist Church. Baker's grave is behind the church and she once sang in its choir.

The five defendants in the Central Park Jogger Rape Case who were cleared after serving their sentences held a press conference to announce they will sue New York City seeking $50 million each as damages.

"At issue in the lawsuits will be whether the men were falsely accused or coerced into making confessions, said Michael Warren, who represents three of the cleared defendants."

For all of our prior coverage of the case in one place, go here.

Attorney General John Ashcroft unveiled a DNA testing proposal today.

The Bush Administration plans to spend $1 billion on DNA testing over the next five years. But, almost all is going to testing DNA in old cases, to reduce a backlog.

Of the $1 billion, only a paltry $5 million is being earmarked for testing inmates with innocence claims who were convicted before the advent of DNA technology. That's a pittance--and a shame.

Josiah Sutton was convicted for rape after a Houston laboratory told the jury that his DNA matched the rapist's. But new testing has confirmed otherwise. He was innocent, and spent 4 1/2 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit. His sentence was 25 years.

The Houston lab is turning into one of the biggest scandals in recent years.

The retesting is part of a review of the laboratory that began after a scathing state audit of its work led to a suspension of genetic testing in January. Mr. Sutton's apparent exoneration is the first to result from the review.

Legal experts say the laboratory is the worst in the country, but troubles there are also seen in other crime laboratories. Standards are often lax or nonexistent, technicians are poorly trained and defense lawyers often have no money to hire their own experts. Questions about the work of laboratories and their technicians in Oklahoma City, Montana and Washington State and elsewhere have led to similar reviews. But the possible problems in Houston are much greater. More defendants from Harris County, of which Houston is a part, have been executed than from any other county in the country.

"This is an earthquake," Mr. Sutton's lawyer, Bob Wicoff, said. "The ramifications of this for other cases, for death penalty cases, is staggering. Thousands of cases were prosecuted on the basis of this lab's work."

Exonerated: Bernard Webster was convicted for a rape he didn't commit. In 1982, science couldn't uncover the truth DNA evidence held. Twenty years later, it could.

How difficult would it be for you to prove your innocence, particularly if you were in a foreign country and the FBI said it was after you? For this 72 year old Englishman, on a wine-tasting vacation in South Africa, it was pretty tough--he spent 20 days behind bars in Durban, due to the FBI's mistake.

The FBI's conduct in the case sounds pretty bad to us- they never even went to interview the Englishman they had caused to be imprisoned.

"My criticism of the FBI is extreme," said Bond during a news conference after his release. "America is meant to be a humane country, but under no circumstances did they behave in a humane way."

So, if you think people who are arrested must have done something wrong or else they'd be able to explain things and go home, this is a powerful lesson it doesn't always work that way. We can only imagine the horror of spending 20 days in a South African jail at the age of 72--because no one would listen to us when we protested our innocence.

A website has been established to help free William Mayo. The site relates that Mayo received two life sentences for armed robbery, two twenty year sentences for aggravated assauult and twenty years probation for burglary. He was convicted in Cobb County, Georgia.

There was no murder or serious injury associated with this case. William Mayo has never been arrested or been in any trouble with the law and was 3 credits shy of graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta. The co-defendents are still incarcerated and are now willing to interview with all media sources to help re-establish the life and liberty that William J. Mayo lost.
On this page you will learn how William Mayo was accomplishing so much in his life, but the one thing he was so proud to do for others would forever change his life. William Mayo was a productive, educated, black male with much determination and only hard work and accomplishments of excellence in his background!

How was an Innocent Man found guilty? On this page you will learn about a trial that didn't have a competent Defense Attorney and a Prosecutor who would do anything to win. The two co-defendants testified with a lie and have stated that in an affidavit and witnesses who testified for the prosecution had shady backgrounds and many different names.

The media is still very interested in William's story but as of November 2002 he has been banned from any further interviews. This we believe was due to the attention of the John Walsh Show.

This website was created by the supporters of William Jonathan Mayo. We encourage you to look through this site and learn about the tragedy of a man who is now living in a hell we just could not imagine for a crime he did not commit.

We wish Mr. Mayo and his supporters the best and are offering a link to the website for anyone who is interested and may want to assist them.

"Dozens of men over the years have alleged that Chicago cops used torture to elicit confessions. The word "torture" still hangs over the police department -- and, if a coalition of defense lawyers has its way, over the Chicago judiciary as well. The coalition is asking that all Cook County judges be disqualified from hearing the cases that include torture allegations. A court is expected to rule on the motions on Thursday."

"The defenders argue that many criminal court judges are ex-prosecutors themselves or are colleagues of former prosecutors. Specifically, the coalition is focusing on the cases of 12 people who are currently in court appealing their criminal convictions. "

Prosecutors oppose the motion.

Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, two of our favorite investigative journalists writing for the Chicago Tribune --often on plight of the the wrongly convicted--today examine the effect of wrongful convictions on the jurors who voted to convict in cases in which DNA exonerated the defendants after trials.

More than 25 years after Michael Evans and Paul Terry were sentenced to 200 to 400 years in prison, some jurors are struggling with DNA tests that suggest they may have wrongly convicted the teenagers of the murder and sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl.

"This has devastated me," said one former juror, a college professor who asked to remain anonymous. "It is crushing--25 years in prison for something they did not do? I would rather be dead."

With nearly 125 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the last two decades in the nation, the anguish expressed by jurors in the Evans and Terry case is becoming a more frequent phenomenon as more cases long considered solved are re-examined and more guilty verdicts are set aside.

The Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law, a non-profit legal clinic created by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992, reports that 123 people have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA.

"The jurors who have the toughest time with exonerations are the ones who in their hearts suspected the defendants were innocent or that they were not given all the information about the case," Scheck said.

What justification can Orrin Hatch have for opposing the Innocence Protection Act that allows inmates to obtain DNA testing that was not available at their trials? We hope you will all write Congress and tell them to pass this bill. It's been languishing in Congress too long, held up by Hatch and a few of his cronies.

Memory and Eyewitness Guru and Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus presented the preliminary results of recent false memory experiments today in Denver at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The research demonstrates that police interrogators and people investigating sexual-abuse allegations must be careful not to plant suggestions into their subjects, said University of California-Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus....

Loftus said some people may be so suggestible that they could be convinced they were responsible for crimes they didn't commit. In interviews, "much of what goes on -- unwittingly -- is contamination," she said.

The news media's power of suggestion also can leave a false impression, Loftus said. "During the Washington sniper attacks, everyone reported seeing a white van," she said. "Where did it come from? The whole country was seeing white vans."

One of Loftus' studies involved asking people about having hugged Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Only Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character so it couldn't have happened.

In the Bugs Bunny study, Loftus talked with subjects about their childhoods and asked not only whether they saw someone dressed up as the character, but also whether they hugged his furry body and stroked his velvety ears. In subsequent interviews, 36 percent of the subjects recalled the cartoon rabbit.

In another study, Loftus suggested frog-kissing incidents that 15 percent of the group later recalled.

"It is sensory details that people use to distinguish their memories," said Loftus, who has conducted false memories experiments on 20,000 subjects over 25 years. "If you imbue the story with them, you'll disrupt this memory process. It's almost a recipe to get people to remember things that aren't true.

Another presenter was Harvard pychologist Richard McNally, who

tested 10 people who said they had been abducted, physically examined and sexually molested by space aliens.

Researchers tape-recorded the subjects talking about their memories. When the recordings were played back later, the purported abductees perspired and their heart rates jumped.

McNally said three of the 10 subjects showed physical reactions "at least as great" as people suffering post traumatic stress disorder from war, crime, rape and other violent incidents. "This underscores the power of emotional belief," McNally said.