Tag: wrongful convictions

Wisconsin Governor Grants Dozens Of Marijuana Pardons As Advocates Pressure GOP Leaders To Advance Legalization

The governor of Wisconsin has granted another round of pardons, including dozens issued for people with prior marijuana convictions.

As Democratic lawmakers in the state continue to push for legalization amid opposition by GOP legislative leaders, Gov. Tony Evers (D) announced on Tuesday that he’s exercised his constitutional authority to provide relief to 82 more people, raising the total number of pardons under his administration to 1,111.

About one-third of the latest pardons were granted to people who had marijuana possession, cultivation or sales convictions on their records, with the majority of the cannabis cases related to simple possession. Another third of the overall grants of clemency went to people with other drug convictions.

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A JURY FOUND THEM NOT GUILTY OF KILLING A COP. A JUDGE SENTENCED THEM TO LIFE ANYWAY.

More than two decades ago, a jury found Terrence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne not guilty of murdering a police officer. But a judge disagreed, and unilaterally sentenced them to life in prison. After 22 years behind bars, their case is now in the hands of Virginia’s highest court, which will decide whether to allow the men to admit new evidence they say proves their innocence.

In 1998, Waverly police officer Allen Gibson was shot and killed with his own gun in the woods behind an apartment complex in the small town of less than 2,500 people. Evette Newby, who lived in the apartment complex facing the woods, told police she’d seen three men go into the woods. Then, she said, she saw two of them struggling with Gibson and heard a loud pop. She identified two of the men as Richardson and Claiborne. Newby also identified another man at the scene, but police told her it was impossible for that man to have been present because he was incarcerated. Newby later said law enforcement officials pressured her to say she saw Richardson shoot Gibson, which she would not agree to, and gave her small amounts of money.

There was no physical evidence linking Richardson and Claiborne to the crime, but they emerged as the primary suspects in the ensuing investigation, despite the fact that police had evidence suggesting another man may have been involved in: Leonard Newby, the witness’ brother. An attorney currently representing Richardson and Claiborne says the defense never knew police had evidence pointing to another suspect.

Richardson and Claiborne insisted they had nothing to do with Gibson’s death. But their attorneys at the time told them that they could be sentenced to death if they went to trial and lost. Richardson and Claiborne were poor Black men accused of killing a white police officer in the South. Out of fear for their lives, they took guilty pleas.

“He said if you go to trial and you mess around and you lose, you could get the death penalty,” Richardson told local news.

Richardson pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to ten years in state prison with five years suspended. Claiborne pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, as an accessory to Richardson’s crime. The county attorney at the time, David Chappell, said he made those plea bargains with Richardson and Claiborne because the case was too compromised: One of the first officers to arrive on the scene was Waverly Police Chief Warren Sturrup, who picked up Gibson’s gun with his bare hands and, in doing so, tainted any fingerprints that may have been on the gun. 

Gibson’s family was outraged by what they saw as a lenient sentence for Richardson and Claiborne, who, in their view, had pleaded guilty to being involved in Gibson’s death. Following public outcry, federal prosecutors brought additional charges against the pair accusing them of selling crack cocaine and murdering a police officer during a drug deal gone wrong. 

In 2001, Richardson and Claiborne went to trial. A jury found them not guilty of officer Gibson’s murder, but guilty of selling crack. 

But in an unusual move, District Judge Robert E. Payne sentenced Richardson and Claiborne to life in prison using “acquitted conduct sentencing,” a legal mechanism approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996. In that case, known as Watts, the court ruled that a jury’s acquittal does not prevent a judge from using the conduct the defendant was acquitted of against them when sentencing them for another charge.

“The Court’s decision to sentence Terrence and Ferrone to life in prison despite being found not guilty robbed due process of its very meaning,” said Jarrett Adams, Richardson and Claiborne’s attorney. “The U.S. Supreme Court must do away with its ruling in U.S. v Watts, which gives a judge the discretion to make a jury’s finding meaningless, and prevent further miscarriages of justice from occurring like the one we see in this case.”

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NYPD detective Louis Scarcella dubbed ‘the closer’ is accused of rigging DOZENS of murder cases and costing taxpayers $110 MILLION in settlements to wrongly-convicted prisoners

A retired NYPD detective accused of rigging dozens of murder cases has cost taxpayers $110million in settlements from 14 overturned convictions.

Louis N. Scarcella, known to colleagues as ‘the closer,’ allegedly coerced confessions and made up witness testimony to help secure convictions leading to people spending decades locked up before being exonerated.

The cost to the taxpayer has been colossal. New York City has paid $73.1 million in settlements to people investigated by the former detective, and the state has paid out another $36.9 million, according to The New York Times. 

The city is expected to be on the hook for tens of millions more, as three men cleared last year of burning a subway token clerk alive in 1995 have filed lawsuits. 

A second-generation cop who smoked cigars, ran marathons, worked a side job at a Coney Island amusement park and jokingly put ‘adventurer’ on his business card, Scarcella, now 72, worked in the Brooklyn North homicide squad during the crack epidemic of the eighties and nineties.

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The story of a horrendous injustice and the three people who tried to expose it begins with a suicide note

Two years into his 25-year sentence for attempted aggravated rape, Nathan Brown could tell the man sitting across from him — a jailhouse lawyer improbably named Lawyer Winfield — was not going to help him get out of prison. It was astounding to Brown that he was pinning his hopes on a fellow inmate who had an eighth grade education and whose formal legal training amounted to a prison paralegal course. “But he knew more than I did,” Brown said.

Brown laid out for Winfield the details of his case. In the summer of 1997, a woman was assaulted in the courtyard of the apartment complex in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where Brown was living with his mother. The woman, who was white, fended off the attacker with her high-heeled shoe until he fled on a bicycle. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, a security guard suggested they question Brown — one of the few Black tenants in the complex.

Brown, 23 at the time, was in his pajamas, rocking his baby daughter to sleep. The deputies put him in handcuffs and brought him to the victim. When she couldn’t identify him, the officers allowed her to get close enough to smell him. She had told them her attacker had a foul body odor. Brown, she would later testify, smelled like soap; he must have showered immediately after, she speculated. In a trial that lasted one day, the jury found him guilty. After his appeal was rejected, he no longer had a right to an attorney provided by the state.

Winfield began translating Brown’s grievances into a legal petition. He argued that Brown’s lawyer had provided ineffective counsel: He had overlooked the most basic defense strategies, failing to challenge the discrepancies in the victim’s story and to insist on DNA testing. The two of them worked on the petition for months, so Brown was surprised when the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal delivered a rejection just a week later. The denial — a single sentence that didn’t address any of Brown’s claims — bore the names of three judges. But something didn’t feel right. How could they return the ruling so quickly? Why was it so vague?

The answer to those questions would come years later, in the suicide note of a high-level court employee who disclosed that the judges of the 5th Circuit had decided, in secret, to ignore the petitions of prisoners who could not afford an attorney. It was a shocking revelation. In a state where police and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines and a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, a group of white judges had decided that the claims of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inmates — most of them Black — were not worth taking the time to read.

Among those petitions was Brown’s claim that a DNA test would have proven his innocence.

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WHY WOMEN’S WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS ARE SO DIFFICULT TO OVERCOME

When Cynthia Sommer’s husband, Todd, died in 2002, the medical examiner said a cardiac arrhythmia was responsible. But prosecutors charged Sommer with murder on the theory she had poisoned her husband, pointing at her trial to the fact that Sommer underwent a breast augmentation, once participated in a wet T-shirt contest, and pursued sexual partners after her husband’s death. The implication was Sommer was not a grieving widow but reveling in her newfound sexual freedom. She was convicted but subsequently won a new trial, after which the charges were dismissed.

Sommer is just one of many innocent people who have been wrongfully convicted of a crime. Experts believe only a small percentage will ever be exonerated. But women like Sommer are rarely the face of this issue. Because of this, the specific contours of women’s wrongful convictions can go unnoticed, obscuring the fact that, while exonerations are already difficult to achieve, exonerating women presents its unique challenges.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, only 285 women have managed to be exonerated since 1989, compared with more than 3,000 men. But experts say that isn’t indicative of the true number of wrongful convictions.

There is “no question” it’s harder for women to achieve exonerations compared with men, according to Marissa Boyers Bluestine, assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the former executive director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. Regarding how many wrongfully convicted women have yet to achieve exonerations, “It’s not even a tip of an iceberg, it’s a tip of a tip of an iceberg,” Bluestone said.

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The Supreme Court’s latest opinion means innocent people must remain in prison

The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction.

One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Jones v. Hendrix, handed down Thursday, does not directly attack this foundational principle. Instead, it does so indirectly by prohibiting many prisoners from ever challenging their convictions in court.

The case centers on Marcus DeAngelo Jones, a federal prisoner who was convicted in 2000 of possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Nineteen years later, in Rehaif v. United States (2019), the Supreme Court held that no one may be convicted under this felon-in-possession statute unless they knew they had a felony conviction at the time that they possessed the gun.

Jones says that he (incorrectly, but genuinely) believed that his previous felony conviction had been expunged when he purchased a gun, and thus his conviction was invalid under Rehaif. In essence, he claims that no federal law criminalized his possession of a firearm, because he did not know he had a felony conviction.

Thanks to Thomas’s opinion in Jones, however, we will never know if Rehaif invalidates Jones’s conviction — that is, if he is innocent of the crime that caused him to spend nearly a quarter-century in prison — because the Court held that Jones may not challenge his conviction at all.

The reason why is a federal law, known as Section 2255, which ordinarily prevents federal prisoners from challenging their conviction or sentence more than once.

After he was sentenced, but before Rehaif raised a cloud of doubt over whether Jones belonged in prison at all, Jones successfully petitioned a federal court to vacate part of his sentence. Thomas’s opinion holds that Jones’s pre-Rehaif challenge to his sentence blew his only chance to challenge his conviction — even though Jones couldn’t have known before Rehaif was decided that he had a potentially valid claim that he is innocent.

Section 2255 contains several exceptions which allow some federal prisoners to bring a second challenge — one of which provides that Jones may bring a second challenge if § 2255’s usual process “is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.”

But Thomas construes this “inadequate or ineffective” language very narrowly — so narrowly, in fact, that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mocks Thomas in her dissenting opinion for ruling that someone like Jones may only seek relief “if the courthouse where a § 2255 motion would have otherwise been filed has burned to the ground or been carried away by a mudslide.”

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‘THIS IS HOW EASY IT IS FOR SOMEONE TO BE WRONGFULLY CONVICTED’

Uriah Courtney was sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. In 2004, a teenage girl was sexually assaulted by a stranger on the streets of Lemon Grove, a city in San Diego County. Prior to being assaulted, the victim noticed a man staring at her from an old, light-colored truck with a fake wooden camper. When the victim spoke with police, she told them she assumed the man from the truck had attacked her, and that her attacker was a white male in his 20s. 

Police put out an alert for a vehicle matching that description. Eventually, someone saw a light-colored truck with a fake wooden camper in that area and called the police. The truck belonged to Courtney’s stepfather. He used the truck for the business where he and Courtney worked and allowed his employees to use the truck as well. Courtney’s coworker had the truck parked in his driveway in Lemon Grove when someone called it in. Both the coworker and Courtney’s stepfather were too old to match the victim’s description, but Courtney wasn’t.

Police presented a photo of Courtney to the victim in a photo lineup. She picked out Courtney, saying she was, “Not sure, but the most similar is number 4,” according to the California Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that helps free innocent people and overturn wrongful convictions.

An eyewitness also identified Courtney. Based on this, Courtney was arrested for kidnapping and rape. In 2005, a jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to life in prison. 

Years later, the California Innocence Project took on Courtney’s case and got the San Diego District Attorney’s office to submit the victim’s clothing for DNA testing. The DNA on the victim’s clothing did not match Courtney. But it did match a man who lived three miles from the crime scene, looked like Courtney, and had been convicted of a sex crime. 

Courtney’s conviction was vacated in 2013. He spent eight years in prison. We spoke with Courtney about his experience and what he wants people to know about wrongful convictions. 

“I could have been in prison for the rest of my life if there wasn’t DNA evidence,” Courtney said. “Sitting in prison all those years. I just felt hopeless. I wished I could die.  When I hear about other people behind bars still awaiting their day back in court, or someone who was just released due to DNA evidence, it hits me from time to time. I try not to think about it.”

The California Innocence Project recently launched a true-crime podcast that highlights cases of wrongful convictions and features interviews with exonerees. The interview below has been condensed for clarity and length. 

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Roaming Charges: Killing in the Name Of…

In this country the inability to say yes to life is part of our dilemma, which could become a tragic one. It is part of the dilemma of being what is known as an American.

– James Baldwin, “The White Problem”

Shortly after 6 PM on the evening of February 7, Leonard “Raheem” Taylor was executed by the state of Missouri for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit: the 2004 murder of Angela Rowe and her three children in suburban St. Louis. Rowe had been Taylor’s girlfriend. She and her children shot and killed in the house she shared with Taylor. In the 19 years since the murders, Taylor never wavered in asserting his innocence and much of the evidence in the case backed him up and always has.

When the bodies were discovered on December 3, 2004, Taylor was 2,000 miles away in Oakland, visiting his daughter Deja. He’d been in California for more than a week and there was plenty of evidence to prove it, starting with security footage at the St. Louis airport showing Taylor on his way to catch his November 26th flight to Ontario, California on Southwest Airlines. Taylor’s daughter and her mother, Mia Perry, both said that Taylor called Angela Rowe from Oakland and put Deja on the phone to talk with Rowe’s children.

But none of this mattered to the cops, who had settled on Taylor as their only suspect. To the police, Taylor’s alibi was manufactured. They viewed it as evidence of his guilt, not innocence. A legal Catch-22: if he were really innocent, why would he need an alibi? The problem for the cops was they had no gun, no evidence and no motive. That’s when they went to work on Taylor’s brother, Perry.

Perry Taylor was a truck driver, who used Rowe and Taylor’s house as a kind of staging area for his life on the road. He stored his things there and sometimes slept in his truck in the driveway. He was in Atlanta when the bodies were discovered. Over the next couple of weeks, Perry was followed, harassed, threatened, and arrested by the Missouri cops. He was interrogated for five hours, during which Perry later said he was coerced into giving a statement implicating his brother, a statement he fully recanted before the trial.

According to Perry, “Some detective right off the bat told me, ‘OK, before we get to the station, here’s what you’re going to say.” As part of the coercion, Perry claimed the cops made threats against his disabled mother and ransacked her apartment. “That’s the kind of shit that makes you hate law enforcement,” Perry later said in a deposition.

The other key witness for the state was Philip Burch, the medical examiner. In his initial report and pre-trail deposition, Burch concluded that the murders took place no more than a week before the bodies were found. This assessment was fatal to the state’s case, because Taylor could prove he was in California during that entire week. Then at trial, Burch suddenly changed his theory to fit the state’s case, testifying that because the air conditioner was left on Rowe and her children could have been killed three weeks before the bodies were discovered.

Still the case strained credulity. For this theory to hold, the prosecutors had to argue that Taylor was so depraved that he stayed in the house with the bodies of his murdered girlfriend and three kids for several days. But that’s exactly what they argued and Taylor’s legal team, ambushed by the dramatically changed testimony of the medical examiner, put up a weak defense. Taylor was found guilty and sentenced to death. (For an in-depth account of this disturbing case see the reporting of Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith for The Intercept.)

In the ensuing years, more evidence supporting Taylor’s alibi and discrediting the police investigation has emerged. But none of his claims of innocence have ever been put to a legal test. Taylor’s supporters had pinned their hopes on the reform-minded Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County Wesley Bell, But Bell declined to invoke a Missouri law permitting prosecutors to reopen possible wrongful convictions, perhaps because of the brutality of the murders and Taylor’s criminal record. But should that really matter?

As Taylor’s execution date neared, Missouri’s Governor Mike Pearson, who has campaigned on accelerating the pace of executions in the state, turned down a request from Taylor’s lawyers for a Board of Inquiry investigation of the evidence of Taylor’s innocence. Pearson curtly dismissed the plea as “self-serving.” After the governor also denied Taylor’s clemency request, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected last appeal and the US Supreme Court refused to issue a stay of execution. In a final indignity, Missouri’s new Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, spurned Taylor’s entreaty to have his spiritual advisor present during the execution.

What is the rush to execute? Where’s the risk in hearing every bit of exculpatory evidence? What are we killing in the name of? Why must the cruelty be torqued up to the very last breath?

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Man Wrongfully Convicted of NYC Subway Stabbing in 1990 to be Compensated $18 Million

A man who was wrongfully convicted of fatally stabbing a tourist at a New York City subway in 1990 will be compensated $18 million.

Johnny Hincapie spent more than 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Hincapie was released from prison in 2015 and his conviction was dismissed in 2017.

According to reports, Hincapie said he was “coerced” into falsely confessing to the fatal stabbing.

Hincapie was sentenced to 25 years-to-life despite the fact that he recanted his confession and exculpatory evidence proved his innocence.

“I have never forgotten the loss his family suffered,” Hincapie said. “I am fortunate that my innocence has finally been acknowledged by my city and my state and I look forward to the next chapter of my life with my family.”

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Former Iowa City schools counselor awarded $12 million after being wrongfully imprisoned for 6 years

Donald Clark won $12 million in a lawsuit he filed against the state of Iowa on Thursday, years after being exonerated and released from prison on false charges that he sexually abused a student while working as an Iowa City elementary school counselor.

A jury awarded Clark $8 million in past emotional distress damages and $4 million for future damages after he spent six years in prison starting in 2010. He was released in 2016 when his conviction was vacated. That year, the court found that his public defender, John Robertson, was ineffective and declared Clark not guilty, but also “actually innocent,” a legally important finding, according to a news release from Clark’s lawyers at The Spence Law Firm LLC.

The jury found that Robertson, who died in 2013, failed to investigate the prosecution’s case against Clark, and a “substandard trial performance led to his conviction and wrongful imprisonment.”

Mel Orchard III of Jackson, Wyoming, one of Clark’s lawyers, told the Press-Citizen on Friday that Clark was joyous when the decision was rendered. Clark and his lawyers spent five years suing the state since his original 25-year prison sentence was vacated.

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