The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/exonerations/)
Three Dallas men freed after being exonerated for crimes they didn’t commit have dedicated the rest of their lives to saving others in the same situation. Filmmaker Jamie Meltzer tells their story in a PBS documentary to be aired Monday.
Calvin Buari, convicted of a double murder he didn’t commit, was a casualty of over-zealous prosecutors in New York’s tough-on-crime era of the 1990s. In a conversation with The Crime Report about his new podcast, “Empire on Blood,” investigative journalist Steve Fishman tells the story of the battle to clear his name.
The cases involved former police Sgt. Ronald Watts, who was sent to federal prison in 2013 for stealing money from a drug courier who was an FBI informant. A defense attorney says 400 more convictions deserve scrutiny.
Roger Dean Gillispie was found guilty of rape, even though he didn’t match eyewitness descriptions, and the evidence made clear he was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He spent more than 20 years behind bars until the Ohio Supreme Court this year gave him back his freedom. The director of the Ohio Innocence Project, who worked on his case, tells the story.
Although appellate courts can’t know whether a defendant is actually innocent, they can—or should—know when a trial is unfair. Unfortunately, says a New York attorney who writes under the pseudonym “Appellate Squawk,” most are simply rubber stamps for miscarriages of justice in lower courts.
Many wrongful convictions are based on forensic testimony and science later exposed as flawed. A California statute this year laid out the terms for granting relief to defendants challenging ‘expert’ evidence—but striking the right balance between evolving scientific research and trial pressures remains a challenge, says a UC law professor.
Judges in New York have been urged to formally remind prosecutors of their obligation to turn over evidence that might exonerate defendants before a trial— or face contempt charges. It’s a step long advocated by reform advocates like the Innocence Project—will other states follow suit?
How much punishment does an offender deserve? The Crime Report’s David J. Krajicek takes a deep look at America’s ‘lifers’–the neglected leftovers of mass incarceration.
Recent high-profile exonerations have highlighted systemic failures and cognitive biases that may be fixed through a system-wide approach to learning from wrongful convictions, according to a new paper released by the National Institute of Justice. Anthony Batts, commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association and Madeline deLeone, executive director of the Innocence Project, examine several exonerations and discuss in the paper what investigations of errors in other fields, such as medicine, […]
A current debate over the handling of eyewitness evidence illuminates the influence that a “downstream” inspection screen (here, the prosecutors) can exercise over “upstream” practices (here, police evidence evaluation).