What do Jimmy Carter, William Sessions, Pope Benedict XVI, Bob Barr, Desmond Tutu, and TalkLeft all have in common? A belief that Troy Davis is innocent, and that his execution would be a perverse injustice. NAACP President Benjamin Jealous writes that Davis "represents the most compelling case of innocence in decades."

While Davis' chances of avoiding execution appear to be slim, he's been given a glimmer of hope by the Supreme Court's adjournment for the summer without deciding whether to review his claim that he's entitled to a hearing to demonstrate his innocence. [more ...]

On Saturday, June 27, consider participating in a Freedom March. The goal is to bring attention to wrongful convictions and to the possibility of executing the innocent. (Consider, for instance, the story of William Jackson “Jack” Marion, the unfortunate victim of "the first, last and only legal hanging in Beatrice," his punishment for murdering Jack Cameron, who turned up alive four years after the hanging.)

New York City and Pittsburgh are among the participating cities. March organizers hope that marchers will participate in every state capitol, making the Freedom March a nationwide event.

A federal jury today awarded Juan Johnson $21.1 million in damages. Johnson spent 11 years in prison for a crime of which he was later acquitted.

Johnson and his brother, Henry, were convicted in 1991 of beating a man to death and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The two spent 11 and a half years in prison before the Illinois Appellate Court reversed the convictions in 2002 based on new evidence that showed the detective had coerced witnesses to implicate the brothers.

"He ruined my life," Johnson said Monday. "I didn't expect to survive. I had given up hope."

Johnson was acquitted at a retrial. [More...]

The New York Times has an article today about Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly imprisoned for 16 years in New York for a rape and murder he didn't commit.

His habeas petition was filed four days late due to a mistake by his lawyer and Judge Sonia Sotomayor was one of the Second Circuit judges who ruled against him.

Ms. Sotomayor, along with the other judge on the panel, ruled that the lawyer’s mistake did not “rise to the level of an extraordinary
circumstance” that would compel them to forgive the delay. There was no need to look at the evidence that Mr. Deskovic insisted would
affirm his innocence, they said.

While Sotomayor, in my view, should have taken a more empathetic and real-world view and not insisted on putting procedure over innocence, given that the lawyer did have an explanation (the court clerk had given him the wrong due date), and while penalizing a defendant for a mistake by counsel sucks in general, the major culprit here as we've written many times is AEDPA and the 1 year filing deadline on habeas claims: [More...]

A fancy extra-wide flat screen high resolution low glare monitor might help you process information quickly, but it just isn't as satisfying as getting smudgy newsprint on your fingers while paging through the Sunday New York Times. Electronic information is nonetheless winning over information consumers, to the detriment of newspapers. Declining circulation leads to less advertising revenue which leads to layoffs of reporters and editors.

Wrongly convicted prisoners and their lawyers have in the past relied on investigative reporters to uncover evidence to prove their innocence. They can no longer count on that valuable tool for unearthing the truth.

[Lawyers] say many fewer cases are being pursued by journalists, after a spate of exonerations several years ago based on the work of reporters.

[more ...]

Via the AP: Proseuctors withhled evidence in a Delaware murder case and as a result, the defendant goes free. How did it happen?

The murder case against a man charged in a shooting two years ago at Delaware State University that left one student dead and another injured will be dismissed because prosecutors withheld key evidence, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Loyer Braden, 20, of East Orange, N.J., had been charged with second-degree murder, assault and other crimes after a September 2007 campus shooting that killed 17-year-old Shalita Middleton of Washington, D.C. Braden's mother says her son works for a water quality testing company and is taking real estate classes.

James Liguori, a pal of TalkLeft, is Braden's attorney. [More....]

Check out the new Artists for Innocence campaign launched by the Innocence Project.

The Innocence Project Artists’ Committee is a group of writers, directors, actors, visual artists and musicians who support the Innocence Project and are helping raise awareness about wrongful convictions.

Members of the Artists’ Committee lend their talent and voice to the Innocence Project’s vital work in a variety of ways. They help raise awareness and money to free innocent prisoners, they speak out about the need to prevent wrongful convictions, and they integrate these issues into their art.

Among the artists involved: John Singleton (Bobak Ha’eri), Amy Brenneman, John Grisham, Paris Barclay, Helen Mirren, Trent Reznor, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Stephen Colbert, Matthew Modine (David Shankbone), Nia Long, Zooey Deschanel, Bob Balaban (Lisa Ross), Morgan Spurlock (David Shankbone), Dave Eggers,and Nora Ephron

You know you're doing good work when prosecutors give up without a fight. Northwestern Law Professor Steven Drizin and the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions can always be counted on to do good work. This time, their good work freed Thaddeus Jimenez from prison, 16 years into a 50 year sentence -- a sentence Jimenez started serving at the age of 13.

Juan Carlos Torres was mentioned as a possible suspect in the 1993 murder of Eric Morro. Witnesses identified Jimenez as the shooter, but a witness who was with Morro told the police that it wasn't Jimenez. The police evidently didn't like his story, and after a "lengthy interrogation" the witness changed his mind and identified Jimenez.

The case came to the attention of the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions in 2005. The center conducted an investigation and, in September 2007, sent its findings to the state's attorney's office. The office launched its own review and, along with Jimenez's attorneys, asked a judge on Friday to vacate Jimenez's sentence. The judge agreed.

Wow. Whether the Cook County prosecutors did the right thing because it was the right thing to do, or just didn't have the energy to battle Drizin and the dedicated students and staff at Northwestern, the outcome is outstanding. Meanwhile, Torres awaits extadition to stand trial for Morro's murder.

New York's top judge, Jonathan Lippman (chief judge of the NY Court of Appeals) has announced the creation of a permanent task force to study wrongful convictions and how to minimize their occurrence. The plan is receiving wide praise.

Members of the task force, who are being selected by Judge Lippman, will include prosecutors, defense lawyers, scientists and lawmakers. They will have a broad mandate to examine police procedures, court rules and other issues involved in wrongful convictions.

“We’re going to take the raw material from all the cases here in New York and, for that matter, around the country, and see what we need to do to change the criminal justice system so this doesn’t happen,” Judge Lippman said in an interview on Wednesday.

This is something that Innocence Project co-founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld called for in their 2002 book, Actual Innocence, and in detail here.[More...]

To their credit, prosecutors agree with Gary Alvin Richard's defense attorney that an analyst from the Houston Police Department's troubled crime lab "misled jurors at Richard’s trial and failed to report evidence that may have helped him." Based on new blood tests, both sides will ask a judge next week to release Richard on bond while prosecutors decide whether his sexual assault charge -- for which Richard has been imprisoned for 22 years -- should be dismissed.

Richard’s case abounds with issues common to wrongful convictions. Among them: The victim identified him some seven months after the attack. HPD crime lab analysts came to conflicting conclusions about the evidence, but reported only the results favorable to the case. Physical evidence collected in what is known as a “rape kit” has been destroyed, a victim of poor evidence preservation practices, leaving nothing for DNA testing now.

Also to his her credit, District Attorney Pat Lykos continues to lobby for the creation of a crime lab that would operate independently, not under the auspices of a police department. That request is a no-brainer. Scientists should base their conclusions on science, not on whether the science helps or hurts the charges that police and prosecutors would like to bring. It's time for the Texas legislature to listen to Lykos.

Jimmy Fennell, a police officer in Georgetown, Texas, responded to a domestic disturbance in October 2007. After he arrived at the scene, he handcuffed an intoxicated woman, drove her to a park, asked her to dance for him, and raped her. Fennell entered a guilty plea to charges of kidnapping and sexual assault and was sentenced to 12 years of incarceration.

This was not Fennell's first incident of sexual misconduct. Evidence uncovered by the rape victim during a civil rights lawsuit revealed Fennell's "wide-spread sexual misconduct while serving as an on-duty police officer." Among other allegations was a complaint that Fennell offered to tear up a woman's traffic ticket if she gave him a lap dance.

Fennell was also suspected of brutally raping and murdering his fiancee, Stacey Stites, in 1996. Evidence revealed by the civil rights suit raises the question whether the man who was convicted and sentenced to death for that crime, Rodney Reed, is actually innocent. [more ...]

Miguel Roman served 20 years of a 60 year sentence for killing his girlfriend. Recent DNA tests proved him innocent and charges have been dismissed.

The DNA tests also led to the charging of another man in the murder:

The same DNA tests that exonerated Roman implicated led police in December to charge another man, Pedro Miranda of New Britain. He is accused in the killings of Lopez, 16-year-old Rosa Valentin in 1986 and 13-year-old Mayra Cruz in 1987. Miranda, 51, faces the possibility of the death penalty if convicted.

DNA not only frees the innocent, it also helps locate and convict the true perpetrator.