Search results

"A year after Mr. Bermudez’s 1992 conviction, five witnesses who had identified him as the killer at trial recanted, saying in sworn affidavits that, they were coerced or manipulated by the police and prosecutors to identify Mr. Bermudez as the killer. Several of those witnesses reiterated...

"The state has now agreed to settle his lawsuit against the lead investigator, Dwight Ransome, $3.9 million.The prosecutors in the case, David Hoke and Debra Graves, were reprimanded by the State Bar association for how they handled the case. The paramount issue in the trial was whether Gell...

"The courtroom was filled with tears, then cheers: Two men who spent 12 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit went free today. And while Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins believes this a defining moment for his office and a turning point for Dallas County, 54-year-old Claude...

"With the three coerced statements in hand, prosecutors made their case that Blanton had not only killed Garza, that he'd done so while robbing him of jewelry, making the charge capital murder, punishable by death. When Reggie testified that the jewelry he supposedly stole from Carlos was, in...

[This is yet another case where the prosecutors withheld extremely significant exculpatory evidence from the defense. My congratulations to Dewey's appeal attorney, Ross Firsenbaum (pro bono casework courtesy of Hale and Dorr).]...

"Prosecutors on Friday dropped their murder case against 35-year-old Yancy L. Douglas and 36-year-old Paris Powell because of witness problems. A federal appeals court in March ordered a new trial for the men, citing prosecutorial misconduct. The key witness in the case claims he testified...

“The police managed to get two boys basically to implicate Chaunte in a murder he had absolutely nothing to do with. They pressured the boys and they managed to get them to tell this false story.” . . . "One of the most difficult to accept things about this case is it took four more years...

"In the past 20 years, 242 people have been exonerated by DNA testing. Approximately 75 percent of them were wrongfully convicted due to some type of mistaken identification on the part of eyewitnesses, said Stephen Saloom, policy director of the Innocence Project, a group that uses DNA...

John Stoll is but one of many, many people wrongfully convicted by juries in Bakersfield California. He will receive 5M$ for his 20 years of wrongful imprisonment. Thirty-four other people were similarly wrongfully convicted as part of the exact same witch hunt...

"A Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge dismissed rape and murder charges against Ralph Armstrong on Friday based on the misconduct of a Dane County prosecutor who concealed evidence of Armstrong’s innocence. Armstrong was convicted in 1981 of the rape and murder of fellow University of...

"To divine Miller's connection, the investigator swabbed the suspect with a gauze pad. He took that pad and scent from the victim's sheets to Deputy Keith Pikett in Fort Bend County. Pikett is the only dog handler in the state who performs scent identification lineups. Pikett's three...

[In a 2001 letter, Nancy Smith wrote: "If I could find someone who truly cared enough to help me that would be a blessing".] At the start of 2009, the appeal status of Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen was accurately depicted as follows. "Smith and Allen's case represents one of the most...

"Prosecutors dropped all charges against the two, saying there was insufficient evidence to try them again for the 1988 murders of two women and three young children. In another case linked to disgraced former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge, the evidence against the two was thin. Prosecutors...

(This case is a good example of pathetic lawyering.) " It started at a seance On Sept. 10, 2006, Vaughan and a friend, Michael Cogan, visited the home of Kelly Ross, who lived several houses away from Vaughan and his fiance on Palmerston Road in Shaker Heights. A woman, who would later accuse...

"Criminal defendants on trial have a Sixth Amendment right to cross-examine forensic experts who prepare lab reports for submission as evidence against them, the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. The 5-to-4 decision invalidates a Massachusetts law that authorized the introduction of...

"The "bullet lead analysis" that was the prosecution's primary tool in an otherwise circumstantial case against Cannon has since been discarded as bad science. The FBI no longer uses it." . . . "A former Oregon State University researcher in the university's Radiation Center provided the...

"Prisoners do not have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, even though the technology provides an “unparalleled ability both to exonerate the wrongly convicted and to identify the guilty.’’ In the court’s first examination of how to...

[Introductory comments ... This regards the long-ago deaths of Barbara and Nick DeTournay and the subsequent murder conviction of Richard Kamienski. It's one of the oldest cases in my top twenty list of likely wrongful convictions. The ruling discussed herein overturns Kamienski's murder...

"At her trial, prosecutors said Harden shot her husband while he was either asleep or passed out on the couch. His blood alcohol content was 0.22, almost three times the legal limit for driving a car, when he died, according to evidence at the trial. Tanya Harden "has got control of that...

"Kennedy posted the $250,000 bond set Tuesday by Judge Thomas Kane, who granted Kennedy a retrial April 21 after being presented with new evidence, including DNA tests that showed that another man's DNA was on the sponge used as a gun silencer and also on the two bodies. Kennedy's DNA was not...