Wrongful convictions in the US

The defendants lawyer was very poor and the search for the truth on the part of the police and DA was weak. Somebody got away w attempted murder and an innocent man spent 12 years in prison.

NYT "A judge in Philadelphia cleared a man in an attempted murder case on Monday after he spent about a dozen years in prison related to a shooting for which officials said there was weak evidence and the prosecution did not meet the burden of proof. The decision ended a yearslong battle to overturn his conviction.

The man, Charles Rice, who goes by C.J., was serving a 30- to 60-year sentence related to a 2011 shooting that injured four people, according to court records. He was convicted in 2013 on multiple charges, including four counts of attempted murder."
 

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Lewkat said:
Do not respond to a cop's interrogation without an attorney. It looks bad, I know, but safe. Yes sir or no sir is sufficient.
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Actually it's not. You have to say "I'm exercising my right to remain silent." otherwise they can and will use plain silence against you in court. Any response besides that one extends the contact and allows them to keep digging until they trip you up.

And they'll often pose questions with only wrong answers as they've been trained. For instance "you don't mind if I search your vehicle?" and then take both yes and no answers as granting permission. The correct answer is "I do not consent to any searches of my vehicle."
 

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Louis Scarcella - NYPD corrupt cop, prosecutors still covering up his actions

NYT "His overturned cases, some of which left wrongfully convicted people in prison for decades, have cost New York taxpayers more than $100 million in settlements and claims."

"For years, prosecutors did not disclose the broad scope of cases that the detective, Louis Scarcella, may have tainted, despite interest from lawyers and exoneration advocates.

But thanks to a simple computer slip-up, the door recently cracked open to reveal details of dozens of homicide cases that were not scrutinized amid a decadelong re-evaluation of Mr. Scarcella’s cases that led to convictions.

In January, prosecutors mistakenly sent a large, unredacted computer file with the Scarcella lists to the lawyers who represent three men who had served long prison terms after being wrongfully convicted in one of the detective’s cases."
 
Nathan said:
Thankfully there's the Innocence Project that assists in reversing erroneous convictions.


Yes, I agree. I just finished watching a case on TV where a false confession was given and it took the Innocence Project 11 years to get the Governor in Virginia to issue a pardon, which now the defendant is seeking a clemency and then an expungement of his case, which means his case never happened.

This case made me mad. I think the 2 cops that put this witness through the hell that they did should have been fired. The part I found most disturbing was that the suspect was a bit slow, which was very evident and should have been a key to the cops interviewing him and that he was a diabetic and the cops withheld his medicine until they got what they wanted. These cops even gave the defendant the information for the answers they were seeking. After an 11 hour interview, which began at 2 in the morning, the defendant finally threw in the towel and gave the cops what they wanted. Of course, he knew the answers to the questions now because the cops gave them to him. I think both of them should have been fired. Usually, I don’t get mad, but these 2 yokels crossed the line.

If you are interested look up the case of Robert Davis in Virginia.
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againstthegrain said:
$13Million payout by SF in wrongful conviction

SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to pay $13.1 million to a man found to have been framed by city police in a murder case.

Jamal Trulove, an aspiring actor and hip-hop artist, spent more than eight years behind bars after being sentenced to life in prison in 2010 in connection with the 2007 slaying of a friend and neighbor of his at a city housing project.

The conviction was overturned in 2014 and Trulove was acquitted in a 2015 retrial.

Then a federal jury determined last year that two homicide detectives fabricated evidence, coerced a key eyewitness and withheld vital information that may have exonerated Trulove.

After Trulove filed a civil rights lawsuit against four police officers and the city, a federal jury awarded him $14.5 million. The city sought to appeal that award, but dropped its appeal after reaching this week’s deal on the lower payout.

The jury found that detectives showed an eyewitness only a photo of Trulove, and no one else, in a bid to identify a suspect, and evidence revealed that two homicide detectives were aware of another possible suspect but did not investigate that lead.

The four officers named in the civil lawsuit have retired without facing discipline in connection with the case, Reisman said.


SFPD at their best.
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SFPD is not a PD that should be emulated by any other PD in the country.
 
birdy said:
A friend of mine knew of him, I believe in Utah when he was in school there. He said Bundy looked like a very normal guy. He was horrified to know how evil he was.
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I crossed paths with serial killer Herbert Mullin in 1972 at Newman's Boxing Gym in San Francisco. I was taking boxing lessons there at the time, and one of the trainers brought Mullin in for a sparring session with an old, washed-up fighter named Richard McGee. Mullin held his own fairly well in the ring, but other than that, his boxing was rather unimpressive. However, what I clearly remember about him were his eyes. When he walked past me on his way out of the gym, I got a good look at them, and they were unmistakably the eyes of a madman.
 
This was very close to a wrongful convictions. 2 LAPD detectives admit setting up the victim in a death penalty case. see 16;00 min. He was ultimately saved by a cell call from Dodger Stadium. They were never punished and one is still an LAPD cop at the time the video was produced.

 
Released on a technicality - he was innocent.

NYT- "The court granted Mr. Grimm a writ of actual innocence, meaning that he is fully absolved of the crime.

In 1976, Mr. Grimm pleaded guilty to abduction, forcible sodomy and murder and was sentenced to two life sentences and 10 years.

Much of the key evidence that linked Mr. Grimm, a neighbor, to the killing was the work of Mary Jane Burton, a senior analyst at Virginia’s crime lab who has since died. Her work was previously linked to wrongful convictions, and is now under a broader review after a podcast raised allegations that she had taken shortcuts and might have even falsified results."


45 years............
 
According to the Georgia Innocence Project, 4-6% of all guilty verdicts are wrong.
There is one case that I would bet most of anything that I have is wrong and that one is the case of Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald who was found guilty of killing his family in 1970.
 
Born_To_Lose said:
According to the Georgia Innocence Project, 4-6% of all guilty verdicts are wrong.
There is one case that I would bet most of anything that I have is wrong and that one is the case of Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald who was found guilty of killing his family in 1970.
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Back in 1980 I served as a juror, after rendering a guilty verdict the judge invited the jury to join him and the DA and defense attorneys in Judge's chambers to discuss the trial. It was a unique experience, and nice to hear that our verdict was correct, even the defense attorneys said their clients were in fact guilty. I recall one of the defense attorneys mentioning that around 3 to 5% of those convicted were in fact innocent.
 
vintageMo said:
No amount of money would make it 'worth it' to wrongfully have to spend 20+ years in Prison. Most people who are incarcerated that long don't even know how to live on the outside after that much time. It's just heartbreaking to imagine what would go through an innocent prisoner's mind, just to survive another day inside a prison.:confused:
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I agree. NO amount of money can ever make these wrongful convictions right. I wish more could be done to prevent it from happening at all.
 
chic said:
I agree. NO amount of money can ever make these wrongful convictions right. I wish more could be done to prevent it from happening at all.
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I had a client that served 17 years before being released. He was found guilty of rape and sentenced to 25 years. He would have been eligible for parole after serving 20 years.

Thanks to DNA and the police detective that saved the bed sheets from the woman's bed in her hotel room. After my client won his case for DNA testing, he was found not to be the defendant. He wasn't immediately released because the state urgently filed an appeal. Three weeks later the appeals court decided to allow the defendant to be set free while the appeal was being decided.

The plaintiff maintained that the defendant was the guilty person who attacked her because he also had a tattoo on his left forearm of a baseball with the number "42" on it. That was Jackie Robinson's uniform number. The trial judge maintained that because the tattoo was very unique, it may be possible that the tech that performed the DNA test could have got it wrong.

The sheet was sent to another independent lab for testing and it too came back as not a match. No one could believe that two black men both had the same exact tattoo on their left forearm. The coincidence was just too impossible to be believed. As it turned out when Jackie died in 1972, tattoo artists around New York were offering the tattoo to anyone that wanted it on their arm for $8.00. Over 5000 men took them up on the offer.
 
CNN - “The decision finally and forcefully clears his name, and at the same time chronicles the State’s outrageous and unrelenting misconduct,” Garber said. “It is important for the people of Tyler, Smith County, and the world to understand this travesty of justice and see it for what it was all along – a disturbing witch hunt by state actors.”


20 years on death row
 
againstthegrain said:
NYT- "Harry Connick Sr., a long-serving district attorney in New Orleans whose office gained national notoriety for prosecutorial overreach that eventually resulted in many reversed convictions, died on Thursday at his home in New Orleans. He was 97.

His death was announced by his son, the singer Harry Connick Jr., in a statement.

The older Mr. Connick was a singer himself and became locally renowned for his nightclub performances in the French Quarter. But his national reputation as a district attorney was much darker, particularly after a 2011 dissent by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that blasted the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office, under his leadership, for singular incompetence and misconduct.

Justice Ginsburg found that Mr. Connick’s subordinates systematically hid evidence that could aid the defense, in violation of the Constitution. Mr. Connick, she said, had “created a tinderbox in Orleans Parish” in which violations of the defendant’s right to be given evidence were “nigh inevitable.”"

"According to the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which works to free the wrongfully convicted, 32 of those convicted during Mr. Connick’s time in office, from 1973 to 2003, were “factually innocent” and later exonerated. In 27 of those cases there was prosecutorial misconduct by Mr. Connick’s assistants, the group’s director, Jee Park, said in an email.

New Orleans under Mr. Connick had “the highest known wrongful conviction rate in the world,” Ms. Park said. “I do not know of any other former or current district attorney in the country with such a devastating record.”

Race was at the heart of it. An overwhelming majority of those wrongfully convicted by Mr. Connick’s office, 96 percent, were Black, according to the Innocence Project."
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I know that repentance is a big part of getting to Heaven, but I pray that no such men like Mr. Connick, make it there! After stealing the lives of so many innocent men who were essentially robbed of their chance to make a decent life for themselves and their families. Deut 32:35 says
It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.”
 
vintageMo said:
I know that repentance is a big part of getting to Heaven, but I pray that no such men like Mr. Connick, make it there! After stealing the lives of so many innocent men who were essentially robbed of their chance to make a decent life for themselves and their families. Deut 32:35 says
It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.”
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I don't know how become can be so despicable.
 
On one hand no one would like to see anybody put to death for a crime they didn’t commit but there have been cases in Illinois where killers have been released and killed again. Timothy Buss is one of those cases and some of the worst serial killers are walking free in Illinois today thanks to the fact that they did away with the death penalty.
There is technology today that wasn’t available 40-50 years ago that can determine without a doubt if someone is guilty or innocent.
I would feel better knowing that a serial killer is at least going to be spending the rest of his or her life in prison without someone coming up 30 years later after most of the evidence and witnesses are gone and saying that this killer is suddenly innocent and that they were wrongly convicted. Have you ever wondered if this person didn’t do it then who did.
If these people are so good at investigating old cases maybe they can tell who really is guilty.
 
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8/8/2024 NYT - "A New York court set aside 46 convictions in cases that featured testimony from a former Police Department detective who had perjured himself, the Queens district attorney announced on Thursday.

The district attorney, Melinda Katz, asked the Queens Criminal Court to throw out the convictions after the [NYPD] detective, James Donovan, pleaded guilty to perjury in May 2023, Ms. Katz said in a statement.

Mr. Donovan’s plea led to a review of his previous cases by the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which identified 46 convictions where Mr. Donovan was the primary witness. The cases were all misdemeanors, according to the district attorney’s office, with charges ranging from disorderly conduct and trespassing to three-card monte.

“We cannot stand behind a conviction where the essential witness was a law enforcement officer convicted of a crime that irreparably impaired his credibility,” Ms. Katz said in the statement. “I believe it is necessary to take this step to protect the public’s confidence in the justice system.”"


NYPD corrupt to the core.
 
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8/10/24 NYT - "“Everyone involved in this case — defense, prosecution, police, and the court — failed, depriving Mr. Marshall of a fair trial,” said Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney. “A critical piece of evidence was not turned over, leading to this unjust conviction.”"

"on Friday, after Mr. Marshall had been incarcerated for 16 years, prosecutors with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said he had been right all along and asked the court to overturn his conviction."

And 2 murderers are free to continue committing crimes, as a bonus.
 
Let's see you have humans committing crimes, humans arresting them, humans prosecuting them, humans defending them, humans on the jury and humans on the bench. All or anyone of these groups could be corrupt, biased, inept, or overzealous. We have to hope we get it right. I think for death penalty case only forensic evidence should be allowed. That means no eyewitnesses, confessions, etc. It's like they either have the accused's DNA on the knife, or not.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
Let's see you have humans committing crimes, humans arresting them, humans prosecuting them, humans defending them, humans on the jury and humans on the bench. All or anyone of these groups could be corrupt, biased, inept, or overzealous. We have to hope we get it right. I think for death penalty case only forensic evidence should be allowed. That means no eyewitnesses, confessions, etc. It's like they either have the accused's DNA on the knife, or not.
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So a criminal can run around killing people with his knife and get away with it as long as he is careful to wash the blade? Not a humanity I would want to exist in.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
I think for death penalty case only forensic evidence should be allowed. That means no eyewitnesses, confessions, etc. It's like they either have the accused's DNA on the knife, or not.
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Death penalty cases are mostly murder related. An eye witness testimony is Direct evidence. How many eyewitness (which also includes other senses) are there in a murder case to support it? Additionally, a defense attorney can challenge a confession, they are not absolute. Also a Judge has discretion on whether to admit it as evidence on the weakness of it. Forensic evidence is Indirect evidence, most criminal cases are such.
 
ohioboy said:
Death penalty cases are mostly murder related. An eye witness testimony is Direct evidence. How many eyewitness (which also includes other senses) are there in a murder case to support it? Additionally, a defense attorney can challenge a confession, they are not absolute. Also a Judge has discretion on whether to admit it as evidence on the weakness of it. Forensic evidence is Indirect evidence, most criminal cases are such.
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Eyewitness testimony may be direct evidence, but it's often not accurate.

Please read the thread, in post #4 a man was exonerated after being convicted of murder on the "eyewitness testimony" of a BLIND person.
fuzzybuddy said:
Let's see you have humans committing crimes, humans arresting them, humans prosecuting them, humans defending them, humans on the jury and humans on the bench. All or anyone of these groups could be corrupt, biased, inept, or overzealous. We have to hope we get it right. I think for death penalty case only forensic evidence should be allowed. That means no eyewitnesses, confessions, etc. It's like they either have the accused's DNA on the knife, or not.
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