If you are wrongfully convicted, and exonerated later

[Steve James]

New York man cleared of murder after 21 years in prison

A New York man was cleared of murder on Friday after serving 21 years in prison, one of dozens of questionable murder convictions linked to a retired police homicide detective.

Derrick Hamilton, 49, was sentenced to life in prison for the 1991 murder of Nathaniel Cash in Brooklyn, a fatal shooting his defense team said he long maintained he did not commit.

Hamilton said he was framed by retired police Detective Louis Scarcella, whose murder cases have been under review by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.

Cases linked to Scarcella came under scrutiny after the New York Times uncovered instances in which the detective relied on the same eyewitness, a drug-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions, and he also delivered confessions from suspects who later denied making such admissions.

In Hamilton's case, investigators determined the account by the only eyewitness was unreliable, the district attorney said in a statement.

Derrick Hamilton, who served 21 years of a life sentence for murder, smiles during a news conference after his conviction was vacated at Brooklyn Supreme Court in New York January 9, 2015. © REUTERS/Stephanie Keith Derrick Hamilton, who served 21 years of a life sentence for murder, smiles during a news conference after his conviction was vacated at Brooklyn Supreme Court in New York January 9, 2015.
The conviction was vacated at a hearing before Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Raymond Guzman, exonerating Hamilton who was paroled in 2011.

Hamilton left the courthouse wearing a cap with the words "Wrongfully Convicted" on the front and "Victims of Detective Scarcella" on the side, carrying his 2-year-old daughter in his arms.

"This is what I've been fighting for 25 years," he said to reporters. "One day in prison is too much for innocent men."

The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office has said it had dozens of Scarcella's cases under review. Scarcella has defended his record.

“Wrongful convictions ultimately destroy the lives of the people who are wrongfully convicted, as well as their families, and also do great damage to the integrity of the justice system," District Attorney Ken Thompson said in a statement.

"The people of Brooklyn elected me to ensure that justice is done and that is what my decision to vacate Derrick Hamilton’s conviction reflects," he said.

Hamilton said when Scarcella arrested him, "he kissed me on the check, like you see in the mafia movies, and whispered in my ear that I was going to prison for a murder he knew I did not commit.

"He succeeded in framing me and I served 21 years,” he said in a statement released by his defense team.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Eric Beech)

[Michael]

Come on, Steve. The reason he was convicted was the judicial process and the reason he was freed was a technicality.

Tulia, Texas and Rampart, those were just bad apples, mixed with technicalities.

[Steve James]

WHITEVILLE, N.C. — For the first time in nearly 40 years, Joseph Sledge woke up behind bars with a chance of becoming a free man.

The 70-year-old man needed one more win at an innocence hearing. As three judges listened to closing statements Friday about how Sledge was wrongfully convicted in the 1976 stabbing deaths of a mother and her adult daughter, he wrote down a few words on a yellow Post-it note — "closure," ''please" and "exonerated."

A few hours later, carrying his belongings in plastic bags, Sledge emerged from a North Carolina jail, saying he was looking forward to what most people consider the most mundane of activities: "Going home. Relaxing. Sleeping in a real bed. Probably get in a pool of water and swim for a little while."

A special three-judge panel unanimously voted that Sledge had proven he was innocent of the killings and ordered his release.

But his freedom almost didn't happen because evidence had been lost for years.

Slayings Reviewed: Joseph Sledge, 70, addresses members of the media after being released from jail in Columbus County, N.C., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2015, after serving nearly four decades behind bars for two slayings he didn't commit. Sledge was found innocent by a three-judge panel who heard testimony from a DNA expert. The expert said none of the evidence collected in the case - hair, DNA and fingerprints - belonged to Sledge.

His attorney, Christine Mumma, took the case in 2004 and felt like she had been running out of options and considered closing the case in 2012. Then court clerks discovered a misplaced envelope of evidence while cleaning out a high shelf of a vault.

The envelope contained hair, found on the victim and believed to be the attacker's, that turned out to be a key piece of evidence needed to do DNA testing, which wasn't available when Sledge went on trial 1978.

"I understand those shelves were very high, but there was a ladder in that room," said Mumma, a lawyer for the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence.

In 2013, the case was referred to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, the only state-run investigative agency of its kind. So far, Sledge is the eighth person exonerated after an investigation by the commission, which started operating in 2007. It has reviewed about 1,500 cases.

Nationwide, The Innocence Project said there have been 325 post-conviction DNA exonerations.

The North Carolina commission found there was enough evidence of Sledge's innocence to refer it to a panel of three judges, who were appointed by the state Supreme Court.

The judges considered the commission's investigative file, and a DNA expert highlighted lab tests in her testimony Friday. Meghan Clement of Cellmark Forensics said none of the evidence collected from the scene — hair, DNA and fingerprints — belonged to Sledge.

The key jailhouse informant, Herman Baker, signed an affidavit in 2013 recanting trial testimony. Baker said he lied at the 1978 trial after being promised leniency in his own drug case and he said he'd been coached by authorities on what to say.

Testimony from another jailhouse informant was inconsistent, according to the commission documents. That informant died in 1991.

The victims, 74-year-old Josephine Davis and her 57-year-old daughter, Aileen, were stabbed to death in September 1976. Aileen was also sexually assaulted.

They were found in their home in Elizabethtown, a day after Sledge had escaped from a prison work farm where he was serving a four-year sentence for larceny.

Sledge was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Katherine Brown, the granddaughter and niece of the victims, said Friday during the hearing that the women were humble and considerate people who looked after other family members.

During her statement, Brown said the family was "shocked that it will become an unsolved mystery" after years of believing they had some closure. She didn't directly address Sledge's innocence in her statement.

After his release, Sledge was headed to Savannah, Georgia, to live with family. He told reporters he never doubted he'd be freed someday despite spending more than half his life in prison.

"I had confidence in my own self. The self will and the patience," he said before trailing off and searching for the right word. "Patience is the word."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/judg ... s-28434441

[Michael]

Up high. On a shelf. Well, I guess that explains it.

Sounds to me that maybe someone finally had a pang of conscience and did the right thing....40 years later, but who's counting.

[Steve James]

http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/29/2014-r ... ked-years/

In 2014, 125 people across the United States who had been convicted of crimes were exonerated — the highest number ever recorded, according to a new report from the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan Law School. The 2014 number included 48 who had been convicted of homicide, six of whom were on death row awaiting execution. Ricky Jackson of Ohio spent 39 years behind bars, the longest known prison term for an exoneree, according to the NRE. Jackson was sentenced to death in 1975 after false testimony implicated him in a robbery-murder he did not commit. Texas led the nation with 39 exonerations; it is followed by New York (17), Illinois (7), and Michigan (7). The federal government exonerated eight people.

So, why was 2014 such a record year? There were 91 exonerations each in 2013 and 2012, previously the highest totals. The NRE points to the increasing number and competence of so-called conviction integrity units (CIUs), groups established by local prosecutors that “work to prevent, to identify and to remedy false convictions.” The first CIU was established in California’s Santa Clara County in 2002; now, there are 15 in operation, working in high-population areas such as Houston, Dallas and Brooklyn. As CIUs have grown, so has their effectiveness in obtaining exonerations: In 2013, CIUs’ work led to 7 exonerations; in 2014, they were responsible for 49.

The Harris County CIU, which encompasses Houston, is responsible for 33 of last year’s exonerations. In early 2014, it reviewed drug cases it had prosecuted after learning that many people who had pled guilty to possession had not, in fact, possessed actual drugs. The Harris CIU’s findings reflected another trend: 58 exonerations this year, nearly half of the total, were so-called “no-crime exonerations,” which means, according to the NRE, “an accident or a suicide was mistaken for a crime, or…the exoneree was accused of a fabricated crime that never happened.”

Sam Gross, a University of Michigan criminal-justice expert who helps run the NRE, acknowledges that there’s been a long-term rise in exonerations, but that the work of CIUs were the “engine” behind this record-setting year. He says it’s likely that the number of exonerations could grow in 2015, with new districts opening their own CIUs. Despite the rising numbers, however, exonerations are still very difficult to obtain. “If we didn’t get it right the first time,” Gross says, “it’s hard to be right the second time.” If anything, the most lasting impact of CIUs’ spotlight on past mistakes could be its role in preventing future errors. “It makes everyone involved sensitive to the fact that errors are possible and could happen to them,” Gross says. “It’s not an obscure thing that happens once in a while.”

[Steve James]

An Illinois man who served 29 years in prison for the rape and murder of a high school girl was freed on Wednesday after DNA evidence cleared him of any link to the crime, officials said.

Prosecutors said on Wednesday they had vacated charges against Christopher Abernathy, 48, who confessed in 1985 to killing Kristina Hickey, 15, in 1984 in Park Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. He was released after a court order, according to Illinois prison records.

Abernathy, who confessed to the crime when he was 18, may have suffered from a "diminished mental capacity," prosecutors said. They tested all available evidence in the case and found that Abernathy's DNA profile matched none of it.

"This is difficult for all parties including the victim's family, but I cannot and will not let a wrongful conviction stand," Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said in a statement.

At the time of the crime, law enforcement did not have the scientific ability to conduct DNA analysis that exists now, she said.

Alvarez started a "Conviction Integrity Unit" in 2012 to focus on reviewing cases involving questionable convictions. Thirteen defendants have since had their convictions vacated.

Such efforts are part of a national trend, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School.

The number of people exonerated in the United States in 2014 climbed to a record high 125, partly because of work by prosecutors willing to admit their mistakes, the registry found last month.

Abernathy, who had dated Hickey briefly, was initially questioned by police and released. He was rearrested a year later after police learned he had allegedly made admissions to a friend that he was involved in the murder.

After 30 hours in custody, Abernathy provided a handwritten confession. But Alvarez said his confession contained no significant details of the crime.

Alvarez said her office would begin a cold-case investigation into the murder, working with the Park Forest Police Department.

An attorney for Abernathy was not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Peter Cooney)

[Michael]

Dash cams for police cars and individuals filming police have put some light on the situation, and I know some PD's are beginning to use video cameras during interrogation as well. Transparency is probably the most effective check on abuse of power. Verifying the evidence is a big part of this. It would be great to see the legal system held to the highest standards.

[Steve James]

A wrongfully convicted man filed a $40 million lawsuit on Tuesday against Northwestern University, a former journalism professor, a private investigator and an attorney, accusing them of framing him for a double murder to get another man released.

Alstory Simon, 64, of Ohio, claims in the lawsuit that he was the victim of unethical tactics by a team focused on freeing another man in what became a celebrated Illinois wrongful conviction case.

Simon was imprisoned in 1999 after confessing to the 1982 murder of two people in a park, and spent more than 15 years behind bars before he was exonerated on Oct. 30, when prosecutors decided his confession was coerced.

Simon "has endured and will continue to endure immense and immeasurable, emotional and physical, pain and suffering, all of which was proximately caused by defendants' misconduct," said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois.

Another man, Anthony Porter, was originally convicted of the murders, and sentenced to death but was released after Simon's confession.

Porter's release was an early victory for Innocence Project programs that work to overturn wrongful convictions. His and other cases eventually spurred Illinois to abolish the death penalty.

"Northwestern denies all wrongdoing in this matter and looks forward to being vindicated in a court of law," said a statement from the university in Evanston, Illinois.

As part of a Northwestern University investigative journalism class he taught in 1998, then professor David Protess instructed his students to investigate Porter's case and find evidence of Porter's innocence, "rather than to search for the truth," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleges that Northwestern, through Protess and private investigator Paul Ciolino, intentionally manufactured false witness statements against Simon.

Fabricated evidence, threats and other illegal and deceitful tactics were used to coerce a false confession from Simon, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also said that attorney Jack Rimland was hired by Northwestern, through Protess and Ciolino, to represent Simon, and that Rimland coerced Simon to plead guilty, lied about the strength of the evidence against Simon, withheld witness testimony implicating Porter and threatened Simon.

Rimland said he had not seen the lawsuit and declined to comment. Protess and Ciolino could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales; Editing by Fiona Ortiz and Sandra Maler)

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/exo ... ar-BBhGnRr

[Michael]

As part of a Northwestern University investigative journalism class he taught in 1998, then professor David Protess instructed his students to investigate Porter's case and find evidence of Porter's innocence, "rather than to search for the truth," the lawsuit said.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/exo ... ar-BBhGnRr

Sounds a bit like the not-so-great film "The Life of David Gale" with Kevin Spacey.

[Steve James]

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Anthony Ray Hinton, 58, spent half his life on Alabama's death row, sentenced to die for two 1985 murders that for decades he insisted he did not commit.

Over 28 years, the outside world changed while Hinton spent his days largely in a 5-by-8-foot prison cell. Children grew up. His mother died. His hair turned gray. Inmates he knew were escorted off to the electric chair or the lethal-injection gurney.

He was set free Friday after new ballistics tests contradicted the only evidence — an analysis of crime-scene bullets — that connected Hinton to the slayings.

"They had every intention of executing me for something I didn't do," Hinton said outside the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham.

Friends and family members rushed to embrace Hinton after his lawyers escorted him outside of the jail on Good Friday morning. His sisters wiped tears, saying "Thank you, Lord," as they wrapped their arms around their brother.

Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson, who waged a 16-year fight for Hinton's release, said while the day was joyous, the case was tragic.

"Not only did he lose his life, he lived a life in solitary confinement on death row, condemned in a 5-by-8 cell where the state was trying to kill him every day," Stevenson said.

Hinton was convicted of killing two fast- food-restaurant workers — John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason — during separate 1985 robberies at Mrs. Winner's and Captain D's restaurants in Birmingham. Investigators became interested in him after a survivor at a third restaurant robbery picked Hinton out of a photo lineup.

The only evidence linking him to the slayings were bullets that state experts then said had markings that matched a .38-caliber revolver that belonged to Hinton's mother. There were no fingerprints or eyewitness testimony.

Stevenson said a defense analysis during appeal showed that bullets did not match the gun. He then tried in vain for years to persuade the state of Alabama to re-examine the evidence.

A breakthrough came last year when he won a new trial after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Hinton's trial counsel "constitutionally deficient." His defense lawyer wrongly thought he had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert to rebut the state's case. The only expert willing to take the job at that price — a one-eyed civil engineer with little ballistics training who admitted he had trouble operating the microscope — was obliterated on cross-examination.

The Jefferson County district attorney's office on Wednesday moved to drop the case after their forensics experts were unable to match crime-scene bullets to the gun.

Stevenson called Hinton's conviction a "case study" in what is wrong with the American justice system.

"We have a system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty then if you are poor and innocent and this case proves it. We have a system that is compromised by racial bias and this case proves it. We have a system that doesn't do the right thing when the right thing is apparent," Stevenson said.

"Prosecutors should have done this testing years ago."

The Alabama attorney general's office declined to comment.

Chief Deputy District Attorney John R. Bowers, Jr. said three experts with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences examined the bullets ahead of the anticipated retrial in the case.

Bowers said all three reached the same conclusion: They couldn't conclusively determine whether or not any of those bullets were fired from the revolver taken from Hinton's home, or even if they had been fired from the same gun.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Hinton is the 152nd person exonerated from death row since 1973 and the sixth in Alabama.

As he left the jail, Hinton said he would pray for the victims' families as he has done for the past 30 years. They have suffered a "miscarriage of justice" as well, he said.

He had less kind words for those involved in his conviction.

"When you think you are high and mighty and you are above the law, you don't have to answer to nobody. But I got news for them, everybody who played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God," Hinton said.

Hinton planned to put flowers on his mother's grave. After that comes the adjustment to the modern world after spending nearly half of his life in solitary confinement.

"The world is a very different place than what it was 30 years ago," Stevenson said. "There was no Internet. There was no email. I gave him an iPhone this morning. He's completely mystified by that."

[Michael]

^^ short video of Hinton speaking to the press after his release.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/watch/ala ... vi-AAap9sL

[Steve James]

I can't imagine being imprisoned for 28 years, let alone being on death row in a 5x8. I completely understand how this man had to believe and have faith in something. All anyone could hope for now is that he can look forward more than he looks back. He can't know whether he has as many years left as he spent incarcerated. There's little chance that he'll receive much compensation --because there are often laws that limit it or set a fixed amount per year based on expected earnings. Unless he can show that the prosecutors were malicious (i.e., knew that he'd be exonerated and concealed evidence), he'll get a percentage of what someone in his position 28 years ago (in AL) would have earned in a year... maybe. No amount would be enough, though.

Anyway, this is the only reason that I'm against the death penalty: human error.

[Michael]

I'm amazed he's in as good as condition as that.

[chud]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/milwaukee-to-pay-65-million-to-man-cleared-after-13-years-in-prison-b99472841z1-298216201.html

[Michael]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/milwaukee-to-pay-65-million-to-man-cleared-after-13-years-in-prison-b99472841z1-298216201.html

Ellis pleaded no contest to strangling his victims from 1986 to 2007. A couple of the crimes occurred while he was living at a halfway house and some after he worked as a government informant.

Gotta love those confidential informants!