Korey Wise (photo via cnews.canoe.com)
The University of Colorado’s Innocence Project got a boost and a new name with a $190,000 donation from Korey Wise, a man exonerated in New York City’s high-profile Central Park jogger case.
The program, operated out of CU’s law school, is now named the Korey Wise Innocence Project at Colorado Law. Wise’s donation allowed the student-led volunteer program to hire a full-time director this fall and provides financial support for its investigative work.
The Innocence Project is a national nonprofit with chapters across the country that investigate claims of wrongful convictions. Colorado’s chapter was founded in 2001 under the Colorado Lawyers Committee and moved to the CU law school in 2010.
Wise was 16 when he was tried and convicted as an adult in connection with the 1989 attack and rape of a female jogger in Central Park.
He spent more than a decade in prison and was exonerated in 2002 after another man admitted to the attack and DNA testing confirmed his involvement. The convictions of the four other men accused in the attack were also overturned.
The men, who became known as the Central Park Five, settled with the city of New York for $41 million in 2014.
This is believed to be Wise’s first major philanthropic gift.
Donald Gates (Photo Source: innocenceprorject.org)
The District of Columbia agreed Thursday to pay $16.65 million to a man who spent 27 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn’t commit.
The amount is about $617,000 for every year Donald Eugene Gates spent in prison. Gates was freed in 2009 after DNA evidence cleared him in the 1981 rape and murder of 21-year-old Georgetown University student Catherine Schilling. A federal jury on Wednesday found that two city police officers fabricated and withheld evidence in the case, and city officials agreed to a settlement Thursday as the jury was getting ready to decide damages in the case.
According to court records, former homicide detectives Ronald S. Taylor and Norman Brooks, both now retired, fed information to an unreliable informant. The informant claimed Gates confessed to him while in jail and that he was tied to DNA evidence. This led to a D.C. Superior court finding Gates guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison. During this time, Gates maintained his innocence and suffered until 2009. It was then that he was cleared based on DNA evidence and the real culprit was identified. Because of the conduct of the officers and his wrongful imprisonment, Gates was earlier awarded $1.4 million under a law that gives $50K per year of imprisonment of innocent people who waive their rights to sue the US government.
In response to the jury verdict, Gates is quoted as saying, “It feels like the God of the King James Bible is real, and he answered my prayers.” Gates, who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., added as he left the courtroom, “Justice is on the way to being fulfilled. . . . It’s one of the happiest days of my life.” article via fox5dc.comand rollingout.com
John Lindsey, Christopher Scott and Steven Phillips work to exhonerate wrongfully convicted men just like they were in documentary “True Conviction” (photo via trueconvictionfilm.com)
As I combed my RSS Feed for stories to share on GBN today, I was particularly taken by an article posted by the indefatigable Tambay A. Obenson of Shadow And Act, (the most comprehensive site on black cinema, past and present, that I have ever come across). It was an update on a documentary project now called “True Conviction” that Obenson has been tracking on his blog for about 2 years, starting with its Kickstarter fundraising campaign in early 2013. Today, he posted the link to a seven-minute preview of the film directed by Jamie Meltzer.
I opened it to watch and was immediately riveted by the story – how three men, each convicted, imprisoned and eventually exonerated for crimes they didn’t commit – banded together to form an agency to help countless other innocent people who are still unjustly serving time. When one of the detectives, Christopher Scott, confronts Alonso Hardy, who confessed to having committed the crime for which Scott was imprisoned, it is a moment to which every person in America should bear witness, and hopefully begin to understand and help change our devastatingly faulty and racist criminal justice system.
Even though robbed of a large chunk of their adulthoods, Scott and his partners Johnnie Lindsey and Steven Phillips dedicate their lives to helping others, because, as Scott states so poignantly at the end of the trailer:
As much as I paid for his weakness, he didn’t do this to me. It was men much more powerful than Alonso. Cops, prosecutors, D.A.s, judges… The justice system wronged me so much, you know, I had to come out and try to make a change. My whole mission is to free as many people as I can before I leave this world.
I’d embed the video if I could, but it won’t allow me. So I am posting the link to the trailer right here: https://vimeo.com/145864128.Additionally, if you want to sign up to receive newsletters about the film, events related to it and upcoming screenings, you can do so at trueconvictionfilm.com. article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Founder and Editor-in-Chief (follow @lakinhutcherson)
Underground Railroad conductor Samuel Burris (image via delawareonline.com)
One of history’s most poignant heroes is finally getting justice after he was tried as a criminal for freeing slaves as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
According to ABC News, Delaware officials have announced their plan to pardon Samuel Burris, who was convicted for leading many enslaved people to freedom in the 19th century.
Gov. Jack Markell will posthumously pardon Burris, a free Black man who was convicted in 1847 for helping enslaved peoples escape. Burris was caught and punished by being sold back into slavery for seven years, but was eventually paid for and set free again by a Pennsylvania anti-slavery society.
He left Delaware after laws were enacted that would place people like Burris under a death sentence for freeing slaves.
He continued to help free an unknown number of slaves until his death in the 1860s.
Robert Seeley, of Havertown, Pennsylvania, and Ocea Thomas of Atlanta, Georgia, confirmed the news after getting personal calls from Gov. Markell. Thomas is a relative of Burris’, while Seeley reached out to Markell for the pardon in light of a recent clemency to three abolitionists in Illinois. ABC Newsreports:
Seeley says he’s been working with Markell’s office but that the governor can’t issue a pardon in Hunn and Garrett’s cases because they were tried in federal court, not state court. He says President Barack Obama would need to pardon them and that he plans to continue to work on a pardon in their case. “Even if it comes out to be a proclamation or a declaration or not an official presidential pardon, so be it. We’ll see what we can do,” Seeley said, adding there is “a lot of red tape.” “[Burris] Is a victory. It brings honor to the Burris family and it brings justice for Samuel Burris and his descendants. It’s making a wrong a right finally,” Seeley said.
The pardon will officially take place on Nov. 2, the anniversary of Burris’ conviction. A historical marker will also be unveiled in Kent County the same day. article via newsone.com
Henry McCollum sits stunned as applause rings out in a Robeson County courtroom in Lumberton, N.C. Tuesday, September 2, 2014, after a judge has declared McCollum and his brother Leon Brown innocent of a brutal rape murder for which they have spent 30 years in prison. Behind him is Beverly Lake, Jr., founder of the Innocence Commission, who was vital in the process to free the men. Photo: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images
Two brothers who were wrongfully imprisoned for three decades for a crime they didn’t commit just received $750,000 in compensation from the state of North Carolina—the highest-possible payout in such an instance.
Henry McCollum, 51, was present for the ceremony in which he and his half-brother Leon Brown, 47, were each awarded the maximum payout approved by state officials. Brown, however, remains in a hospital, where he’s undergoing treatment for mental health issues stemming from their imprisonment. The brothers were officially pardoned in June, which made them eligible for financial restitution.
They were released from prison a year ago after fresh DNA evidence emerged and exonerated them. The testing was performed by the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, whose purpose is to investigate disputed cases.
According to their attorneys, the brothers “were scared teenagers with low IQs” who investigators manipulated and berated, feeding them details before they signed false confessions for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in 1983. McCollum was the longest-serving inmate on the state’s death row, while Brown was convicted to life in prison. Both were attacked while serving their sentences, and Brown was repeatedly sexually assaulted by other prisoners.
The money will go into funds that will help the men and their families financially—something that has been difficult ever since the brothers’ release and subsequent difficulty readjusting to life on the outside. article by Sameer Rao via colorlines.com
Kareem Bellamy, seen reacting when his murder conviction was overturned in 2011, will receive $2.75 million from the state. (Photo: DELMUNDO, ANTHONY FREELANCE NYDN/ANTHONY DELMUNDO)
Innocent Queens man Kareem Bellamy, wrongfully imprisoned for 14 years on murder charges, reaped a $2.75 million windfall from New York State authorities on Wednesday.
“It’s a message that I’ve been saying from the start — that I was innocent,” Bellamy told the Daily News. “But it doesn’t make up for what I went through to be honest.”
Charges against Bellamy, 47, were dropped in 2011 after evidence emerged that cleared him of the fatal Queens stabbing of James Abbott Jr. 17 years earlier.
But prosecutors in the Queens District Attorney’s office never acknowledged that Bellamy was innocent — even after a judge vacated his conviction — arguing instead that an audiotaped confession by a second murder suspect was phony.
“Mr. Bellamy has now been freed from that conviction based on an outright fraud perpetrated against this court,” said Assistant District Attorney Brad Leventhal said at the time. “He has not — I repeat — he has not been exonerated.”
But Bellamy’s longtime lawyer Thomas Hoffman said the settlement, which was approved by Alan C. Marin of the New York Court of Claims, helped make that case.
“It shows some recognition that he never committed the murder,” Hoffman, who has worked with Bellamy for 11 years, told the News. “That’s why it is so symbolic that he received this money.”
Bellamy, a father of three who was incarcerated at the age of 26 until he was 41, was released from prison on bail in 2008.
He now helps advocate for the wrongfully convicted with the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation.
The Queens District Attorney’s office had no comment by press time. article by Eli Rosenberg via nydailynews.com
The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is creating a unit dedicated to examining wrongful-conviction claims, joining a small but growing number of prosecutorial agencies around the country that are devoting resources to identify innocent prisoners. Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey
Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey is asking county supervisors for nearly $1 million to fund the new team, which would include three prosecutors, an investigator and a paralegal.
In seeking the funds, Lacey’s office said it wanted to keep up with an increasing number of wrongful-conviction claims that have followed the advent of similar units around the country as well as a growing number of innocence projects and increased publicity of innocence claims, said county spokesman Dave Sommers.
“This is exactly what should happen in every district attorney’s office in America,” said Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project at the California Western School of Law in San Diego. “We all have the same goal: to make sure the right people are in prison.”
While such units are still rare, Los Angeles would join more than 15 district attorney offices around the country that have adopted similar teams, including Santa Clara County, Dallas County, Brooklyn and Manhattan, as well as the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles’ proposal remained largely under wraps until last week, when Lacey addressed a group of attorneys and students at Loyola Law School on Friday and mentioned she had been promised funding for a conviction review unit. She gave no details and did not return calls for comment.
A district attorney’s spokeswoman declined to discuss the plan until after the Board of Supervisors formally approves the funding in the coming weeks. The county’s recommended budget includes money for the unit for the next fiscal year, which starts in July.
Rosean S. Hargrave leaving court in Brooklyn on Tuesday after a hearing at which his conviction for the murder of an off-duty correction officer was vacated. (Credit: Sam Hodgson for The New York Times)
More than two decades after Rosean S. Hargrave was convicted of murdering an off-duty correction officer in Brooklyn, a judge on Tuesday ordered him released from prison, saying Mr. Hargrave’s prosecution was based on deeply flawed detective work that “undermines our judicial system.”
Mr. Hargrave, surrounded by his family and friends as he left State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, was asked whether he had thought he would ever be free.
“I dreamt,” he said.
The prosecution of Mr. Hargrave was built on the work of the former detective Louis Scarcellaand his partner, Stephen W. Chmil. It is one of dozens of cases that have come under review since accusations emerged that Mr. Scarcella once framed an innocent man. Six people have had their convictions overturned, one posthumously, since the Brooklyn district attorney’s office began its review in 2013.
But this is the first time that Mr. Scarcella’s investigative methods have come under direct judicial scrutiny, and Justice ShawnDya L. Simpson delivered a scathing review of his record.
Many of the cases under review date to an era when many neighborhoods were plagued by crime, with the city regularly registering well over 1,000 murders a year. It was in this environment that Mr. Scarcella made his name, gaining wide acclaim for solving murder cases.
Justice Simpson noted that Mr. Scarcella was something of “a legend” for getting so many convictions. “There’s a saying, when it’s too good to be true, it usually is,” she said.
Mr. Hargrave’s conviction, she said, was “based solely on identification of evidence by Detective Scarcella and Detective Chmil” and therefore “brings into question the due process and reliability in this trial.”
Justice Simpson said that if the case were tried today, there would most likely be a different outcome. She also noted that since the time of the trial, no new evidence had emerged to support the prosecution, citing the lack of ballistics or serology testing, or a fingerprint match to identify Mr. Hargrave. “The scant evidence that convicted the defendant makes the newfound wrongdoing of Detective Scarcella significant,” Justice Simpson said.
Since the trial, she also said, “potentially exculpatory evidence” had been destroyed, further undermining the chances that Mr. Hargrave could find justice. After the judge read her decision, Mr. Hargrave’s mother broke down in tears as others around her burst out with shouts of joy.
“Thank you, your honor!” his sister Monique Hargrave shouted. “Thank you, God.” Outside the courthouse, Mr. Hargrave’s mother, Shirley, was still trying to process the fact that her son would finally be set free.
“I have never been so happy in 23 years,” she said. “I’m just so glad it’s over, and I hope it never happens to anyone else.” During the proceeding, Mr. Hargrave sat stoically, despite the celebrations behind him. His lawyer, Pierre Sussman, embraced him in a long hug.
“This is the strongest condemnation from the court of Detective Scarcella and Detective Chmil,” Mr. Sussman said. “Mr. Hargrave went in at age 17, and he’s being released at age 40.”
Justice Simpson said that the district attorney’s office had 30 days to appeal the ruling but that if prosecutors did not present new evidence in that time, any new trial would have to rely on the flawed evidence gathered by the detectives. Mark Hale, the chief of the conviction review unit for the district attorney’s office, said prosecutors were reviewing the decision before deciding how to proceed.
The decision caps a long battle to win Mr. Hargrave’s freedom. The New York Times investigated Mr. Hargrave’s case as part of a series of articles examining Mr. Scarcella’s record.
In a September hearing on the motion to vacate the conviction, Mr. Hargrave’s lawyers argued that the case had problems that began with flawed work by Mr. Scarcella and continued through the trial.
Supporters of Mr. Hargrave at the hearing, the end of a long battle for his freedom. Now 40, he was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison at age 17. (Credit: Sam Hodgson for The New York Times)
For instance, blood evidence was lost, making DNA testing impossible. And the case hinged on one witness: another correction officer who was in the car with the officer who was killed, in a 1991 shootout in Crown Heights.
Anthony Ray Hinton wipes away tears as he stands outside the Jefferson County Jail in Alabama April 3, 2015, after serving 30 years on death row. (NBC News)
Anthony Ray Hinton walked out of prison a free man Friday after nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row. He stepped into the sunshine, praised God and thanked his lawyers, according to CNN.
Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro on Thursday dismissed the case against the 58-year-old man. One day earlier, prosecutors told the judge that they couldn’t link the bullets from the crime scene to Hinton, who always asserted his innocence in the 1985 murders of two men.
“All they had to do was to test the gun,” Hinton exclaimed to reporters, “but when you think you’re high and mighty and you’re above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody.”
Hinton’s attorneys had long said that their client was another wrongfully convicted black man who faced a death sentence.
“Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,” said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Rights Initiative and Hinton’s lead attorney, according to CNN. “I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton.”
Prosecutors won a conviction even though there were no eyewitnesses, fingerprints or other physical evidence linking Hinton to the murder of two restaurant workers during a robbery.
Bullets at the crime scene had questionable links to a gun found in Hinton’s home. But tests raised doubts about whether the bullets were fired from that gun and, in fact, whether they were all fired from the same weapon.
On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hinton’s favor, and he was granted a new trial. But the prosecutors struggled to put evidence together to win a conviction in the retrial. Consequently, they filed a motion to drop the charges.
Read more at CNN. article by Nigel Roberts via theroot.com
