“It’s no exaggeration to say hundreds if not thousands of parents and caregivers are in prison in cases where no crime occurred,” says a spokesperson for the Innocence Project. Robert Roberson may be one of them. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 after...
Wrongful Convictions
Is it better for the guilty to go free than to risk a wrongful incarceration?
One of the most well-known and frequently quoted legal maxims is this: it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” That was written by Sir William Blackstone in 1765, but it is far from the first or only expression of the idea....
Ohio man gets $4M; exonerated of rape after 16 years in prison
Christopher Miller was convicted of rape and other charges in 2002. He was sentenced to 40 years. The hitch is, he didn’t commit the crime. He was convicted in an apparent rush to judgment after a Cleveland Heights, Ohio, woman was attacked and raped. Her purse was...
Richard Glossip didn’t do it and we know who did. Why is he on death row?
In January 1997, Justin Sneed murdered an Oklahoma motel owner named Barry Van Treese. He has admitted as much. In exchange for more favorable treatment, Sneed agreed to implicate and testify against Richard Glossip, the motel’s manager. The prosecution’s theory was...
Now exonerated of murder, man had same name as suspect
Thomas Raynard James has now spent more than half of his life in prison. Over 31 years were stolen from him by a wrongful conviction based on a series of mistakes that led to a mistaken identification. Never once did he give up trying to prove his innocence, and now...
Wrongfully convicted man sues Milwaukee for rights violations
Two months after Lavare Gould, 19, was killed in 2008, Milwaukee police had no suspect or leads. Then, a man who was arrested in an unrelated case claimed to have information about Gould’s case. The information was conflicting, but it implicated Ladarious Marshall,...
Fatally flawed arson evidence means Tennessee man goes free
In February 1992, 24-year-old Lorie Lance died in a fire in Old Hickory, Tennessee. Her boyfriend, Claude Garrett, awoke to find his and Lorie’s living room on fire. He woke Lorie up and ran for the door, but Lorie suddenly turned and ran toward the back of the house....
Held pretrial for 4 years, 2 men were exonerated and are now suing
It was a shocking and terrible crime. In 2016, two gunmen acted in concert to drive partygoers to a Pittsburgh-area house’s back porch and then shoot them. Five people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were killed. A sixth person was paralyzed and died...
Reasonable doubt: The role of stereotypes in a Texas woman’s case
If her conviction isn’t reconsidered, Melissa Lucio is expected to be executed on April 27. If that happens, she will be the first Latina to be executed by the state of Texas. She was convicted of murdering her daughter Mariah, but some experts believe no crime was...
Why do states resist posthumous DNA tests to exonerate people?
Ledell Lee always insisted on his innocence. He was convicted of a shocking murder – the 1993 strangulation and bludgeoning of a 26-year-old woman, but he always denied that he had been the perpetrator. His sister has been fighting for years to prove his innocence, as...