False Arrests, Convictions and Imprisonments

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    Jury Awards $120 Million to Illinois Men Wrongfully Convicted of Murder

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    John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were teenagers when they were coerced into giving false confessions in a 2003 murder in Chicago.A federal jury in Chicago awarded $120 million on Monday to two Illinois men who spent more than 16 years behind bars for a 2003 murder they did not commit.John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were teenagers when they were convicted in 2006 for the murder of Christopher Collazo, whose body was found bound and partly burned in an alley on the South Side of Chicago in the early hours of March 10, 2003. Their convictions were vacated in 2019.Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell each filed a federal lawsuit in 2020 against the City of Chicago, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and several Chicago police officers, arguing that the men had been framed and were coerced into giving false confessions.After a month of testimony, a federal jury deliberated for two days before finding that the men had been railroaded into giving false confessions and that detectives had fabricated evidence against them, according to court records. Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell were each awarded $60 million in damages.Mr. Fulton said in a phone interview on Tuesday that he knew his day of justice would come.“It was a sense of relief,” he said of the verdict. Referring to others still serving time for crimes they did not commit, he added, “I also thought about all the others who haven’t gotten a chance to see this day for themselves.”Jon Loevy, a lawyer for Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell, described the moment the jury read its verdict as “very emotional.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Georgia Man Charged With 1985 Murders of Couple in Church

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      Erik Sparre was arrested earlier this week, more than two decades after Dennis Perry was wrongly sent to prison for the crime.Nearly 40 years after Harold and Thelma Swain were shot to death in a small church in Camden County, Ga., and after a man was wrongly sent to prison for two decades over the crime, the authorities arrested another man who they believe murdered the Swains.The man, Erik Kristensen Sparre, 61, of Waynesville, Ga., was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault in the 1985 deaths of the Swains, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced on Monday.Dennis Perry, who is now 62, was convicted of two counts of homicide in 2003 but he was released in 2020 after his conviction was overturned, in part because reporting by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cast doubt on an alibi that Mr. Sparre had used when he was investigated after the killings.Mr. Sparre was arrested in Waynesville, about 90 miles south of Savannah, at a store near his home without incident, according to the Bureau of Investigation. He was booked into the Camden County Jail. The Bureau of Investigation declined to comment further.After a Bible study session in 1985, Harold Swain, 66, and Thelma Swain, 63, a married couple, were killed in the vestibule of the Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Waverly, Ga., about 14 miles southeast of Waynesville.Investigators contacted Mr. Perry after receiving a tip, learned that he had been working hundreds of miles away in the Atlanta area around the time of the killings, and cleared him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas Judge Finds Death Row Inmate Melissa Lucio Innocent In Daughter’s Death

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      In a court filing, the judge said the conviction of Melissa Lucio, whose scheduled execution in 2022 was halted, should be overturned. The state’s highest criminal court will now decide.A Texas district judge declared that a mother on death row is innocent in the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter, according to court documents filed in October but made public this week.The decision in the case now stands with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, which in 2022 halted a scheduled execution of the mother, Melissa Lucio, to gather more evidence. That included asking the district judge in the original trial, Arturo Nelson, to file an opinion. An execution date has not been rescheduled.Ms. Lucio, 56, who lived in the border city of Harlingen, was sentenced to death in 2008 after her daughter, Mariah Alvarez, died as a result of what prosecutors said was the mother’s physical abuse. Ms. Lucio and her lawyers have long maintained her innocence, arguing that Mariah died from complications after accidentally falling down a flight of stairs. An autopsy said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.Judge Nelson sided with Ms. Lucio in his recent findings, writing that she was “actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter.”He added that, even regardless of that conclusion, Ms. Lucio had a right to have her conviction overturned because the state had used false testimony in her trial and withheld evidence that was favorable to her case. The judge also cited new scientific evidence that was unavailable during her trial.It was unclear on Saturday when the Court of Criminal Appeals would issue its ruling. Vanessa Potkin, one of Ms. Lucio’s lawyers and a special litigation director for the Innocence Project, said it could take a couple of months. Once that court rules, the case could be returned to trial court, at which point a prosecutor would decide if the case should be retried or the charges dismissed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Members of ‘Central Park 5’ Say Trump Is Too Dangerous for Second Term

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      Not long after the rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989, Donald J. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads about the case, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty.The five Black and Latino teenagers accused in the attack — Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Antron McCray, known as the Central Park Five — served years in prison before being cleared in 2002 by DNA evidence and the confession of another man.But Mr. Trump has refused to apologize.At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night, four of the five men — who now prefer to be called the Exonerated Five — said that what Mr. Trump did to them was devastating and proves that he is too callous and dangerous to serve a second term as president.The men, excluding Mr. McCray, who was not present, offered vigorous endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz.Mr. Wise, who served more than 13 years in prison, the longest term among the group, told the convention crowd that the men’s youth had been stolen from them and they faced the screams of adults as they entered court each day because of Mr. Trump’s actions.“He called us animals. He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for our execution,” Mr. Wise said. “We were innocent kids, but we served a total of 41 years in prison.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Read the Ruling by the Virginia Court of Appeals

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      Safeguards in the Twenty-First Century, 2006 Wis. L. Rev. 479, 514 (2006); Gisli H. Gudjonsson, The
      Science-Based Pathways to Understanding False Confessions and Wrongful Convictions, 12 Frontiers
      Psychol. Feb. 2021. Further, Grimm presents a report from Dr. Richard Leo, Ph.D., J.D. Dr. Leo is a subject
      matter expert in false confessions and reviewed both the content and context of Grimm’s confession.
      DECISIONAL STANDARD
      “A person seeking a writ of actual innocence faces a daunting task; the process begins not with a
      presumption that a petitioner is innocent, but rather, that he or she is guilty.” Haas v. Commonwealth, 74
      Va. App. 586, 624 (2022); see also Tyler v. Commonwealth, 73 Va. App. 445, 459 (2021) (recognizing that
      this Court begins “with the presumption that [petitioner]’s conviction, the result of a full criminal trial that
      has been affirmed on direct appeal, is correct”). “Because the petition is filed with us in the first instance, we
      are not reviewing a judgment below in the traditional appellate sense, and consequently, there is no appellate
      standard of review to apply.” Tyler, 73 Va. App. at 458. “Rather, actual innocence petitions ‘present[] one of
      the rare situations in which the General Assembly has charged an appellate court with engaging in factual
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      evaluation.” Id. (alteration in original) (quoting Dennis v. Commonwealth, 297 Va. 104, 127 (2019)).
      Therefore, “[s]itting ‘as a court of original jurisdiction[,]’ we have ‘the same authority to weigh and
      evaluate documentary and physical evidence as a trial court would have.” Id. at 458-59 (second alteration in
      999
      original) (quoting Haas v. Commonwealth, 283 Va. 284, 292 (2019)). In exercising such jurisdiction, this
      Court must consider “the record of any trial or appellate court action,” Code § 19.2-327.11(D), and “the
      petition, the response by the Commonwealth, previous records of the case, the record of any hearing held
      under this chapter, and, if applicable, any findings certified from the circuit court pursuant to an order issued
      under this chapter[.]” Code § 19.2-327.13. The purpose of this review is “to allow us to perform the fact-
      finding function the General Assembly assigned us in the statutory scheme-determining whether the
      petitioner has produced sufficient new evidence to establish the statutory requirements to the requisite level of
      proof to warrant overturning a presumptively valid conviction.” Tyler, 73 Va. App. at 459.
      – 11 – More

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      A Black Teenager Was Wrongfully Executed in 1931. Now His Family Is Suing.

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      Alexander McClay Williams was 16 when he was executed in Pennsylvania for the murder of a 34-year-old white woman. His conviction was overturned in 2022.On June 8, 1931, Alexander McClay Williams, a 16-year-old Black student, was executed by electric chair, the youngest person to be put to death in Pennsylvania history.Months earlier, Alexander had been convicted of murdering a 34-year-old white woman, Vida Robare, a matron at the reform school outside Philadelphia that Williams attended.There were no witnesses to the murder, and evidence that might have cleared Alexander was kept from the jury by prosecutors. For almost four decades, Sam Lemon, a great-grandson of William Ridley, Alexander’s lawyer, worked to reveal that Williams had not committed the crime, and was the victim of gross prosecutorial misconduct by Delaware County, Pa.A judge overturned the conviction in 2022 and granted a motion for a retrial. Jack Stollsteimer, the Delaware County district attorney, moved to dismiss the charges posthumously, acknowledging yet another example of a Black person being wrongfully convicted of a crime they hadn’t committed.On Friday, Alexander’s family filed a federal lawsuit in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Delaware County, as well as the estates of the detectives and prosecutors on the case, calling their conduct “outrageous, malicious, wanton, willful, reckless and intentionally designed to inflict harm.”“They murdered my brother. That’s what they did,” Susie Carter, Alexander’s 94-year-old sister, said in an interview on Monday. Ms. Carter, along with two of Alexander’s nieces, Osceola Carter and Osceola Perdue, are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Philadelphia Man Is Freed After 34 Years in Prison

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      Police had hidden evidence showing that Ronald Johnson did not participate in the crime he was convicted of, his lawyer said.Ronald Johnson, who had spent more than three decades behind bars, was freed on Monday after a Philadelphia judge vacated his sentence and reversed his conviction, officials said.Judge Scott DiClaudio granted Mr. Johnson’s bid for post-conviction relief by doing so. Prosecutors informed the court that they would not pursue a new trial and moved to dismiss all charges, which the judge granted.That, his lawyer, Jennifer Merrigan, said, meant Mr. Johnson was a free man.“There’s no way that they could retry him because there is absolutely no evidence against him,” Ms. Merrigan said in an interview on Tuesday.Mr. Johnson, 61, had served 34 years after he was convicted of the 1990 murder of Joseph Goldsby. The conviction had been based “solely on the false testimony of two witnesses,” the nonprofit public interest law firm Phillips Black, which advises incarcerated individuals, said in a statement.The police had hidden evidence showing that Mr. Johnson did not participate in the crime, Ms. Merrigan said. She pointed to two witnesses who had given statements to the police after being interviewed multiple times, in which they said Mr. Johnson wasn’t present, and “actually identified a different person.”“The police then hid that evidence, and so when he went to trial, the jury heard from two witnesses who said that he was there. But he and his lawyers did not know that these witnesses had given many other statements,” she said.Ms. Merrigan said that “this kind of police misconduct has happened a lot in Philadelphia, and a lot around the country.”“It is really unfair both to the people who get convicted and lose many years of their lives, but also to the victims, who don’t learn what really happened to their loved one,” she said.After a Philadelphia judge vacated his sentence and reversed his conviction on Monday, Ronald Johnson hugged his son, Ronald Johnson Jr., left. His sister, Marian Johnson, is at right.Marg MaguireMr. Johnson, who had maintained his innocence throughout his years behind bars, said he had spent the first 24 hours of his newfound freedom taking a bath, shopping for clothes and getting a driver’s license. He enjoyed a big meal with his family, with rib-eye steak, shrimp and steak fries.“I’m starting a new chapter, and I’m not rushing in,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Tuesday, noting that “these long years, they’ve been rough.”“You might just cry at night,” he said, but “the next day you just got to pick yourself back up.”Mr. Johnson, who will turn 62 this summer, said he thinks he’s “going to have two birthdays now.”“The day I got out, and my regular birthday,” he said. “I think I’m going to celebrate them two days the rest of my life.” More

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      A Century Later, 17 Wrongly Executed Black Soldiers Are Honored at Gravesites

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      More than a century ago, 110 Black soldiers were convicted of murder, mutiny and other crimes at three military trials held at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Nineteen were hanged, including 13 on a single day, Dec. 11, 1917, in the largest mass execution of American soldiers by the Army.The soldiers’ families spent decades fighting to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November, they won a measure of justice when the Army secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions and acknowledged that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”On Thursday, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed servicemen.Just before he was executed, Private Hawkins wrote a letter to his parents, telling them: “Although I am not guilty of the crime that I’m accused of Mother, it’s God’s will that I go now and in this way.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThe new headstones acknowledge each soldier’s rank, unit and home state — a simple honor accorded to every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous headstones that noted only their name and date of death.(The families of the other two who were hanged reclaimed their remains for private burial.)The headstones were unveiled after an honor guard fired a three-volley rifle salute, a bugler played “Taps” and officials presented the descendants with folded American flags and certificates declaring that the executed soldiers had been honorably discharged.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for 37 Years to Receive $14 Million From City of Tampa

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      Robert DuBoise, 59, was sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted in a 1983 murder and rape. He sued after his conviction was overturned and reached a settlement with the city on Thursday.A man who spent 37 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in the 1983 rape and murder of a woman in Tampa, Fla., will receive $14 million in a settlement with the City of Tampa, it said Thursday.The man, Robert DuBoise, 59, was just 18 when he was arrested in connection with the killing of Barbara Grams, 19, who was beaten to death and whose body was discovered behind a dental office on the north side of the city on Aug. 19, 1983.Mr. DuBoise was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery in 1985 following a one-week trial in which a jailhouse informant claimed he was guilty, and prosecutors argued that Mr. DuBoise’s teeth matched what they described as a bite mark on the victim’s cheek. He was initially sentenced to death, but three years later, the Florida Supreme Court changed that sentence to life in prison.In August 2020, Mr. DuBoise was freed after new DNA evidence came to light that exonerated him and implicated two other men who were later charged in the killing. The next year, Mr. DuBoise filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Tampa, four former police officers and the forensic odontologist who had testified against him.On Thursday, the Tampa City Council unanimously approved the settlement, which is to be paid in three installments over three years.“I’m just grateful,” Mr. DuBoise said in an interview Thursday, adding that he hoped his case could serve as an example for others who had been wrongfully convicted. He said he hoped that “they get justice and can move on without having to spend the rest of their life fighting the system that has already wronged them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More