A pair of former Illinois prisoners, each exonerated after spending 23 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit, accepted a total of $14.5 million in settlements from the City of Rockford, which voted in April 2025 to issue bonds to cover the debt. 

Both Patrick Pursley, now 55, and John W. Horton, now 49, were wrongfully convicted of 1993 murders. Pursley was 23 when he was accused of fatally shooting Andy Ascher in a botched robbery attempt. Horton was 17 that same year, when he was charged with murdering Arthur Castaneda while attempting to rob a McDonald’s. Horton provided police a false confession under intense questioning, but Pursley consistently maintained his innocence.

Pursley was convicted after a state firearms expert testified that a gun recovered from his home matched the weapon used to kill Ascher “to the exclusion of all other guns.” Pursley continued to contest that testimony even after his conviction, joining a crusade that resulted in a new 2007 state law allowing comparison of ballistic evidence after conclusion of a trial. In the law’s inaugural use, two experts independently concluded that the evidence from the scene of Ascher’s death and the gun from Pursley’s home did ...

On January 6, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reinstated the claim of a now-exonerated Maryland prisoner against a trio of Baltimore cops who allegedly coerced a confession from an eyewitness that was used to convict him of a fatal shooting in December 1986. The false testimony was later recanted, but not before it put Gary Thomas Washington in prison, where he remained for 31 years until 2018, when his conviction was overturned and he was granted a writ of actual innocence. That allowed him to collect nearly $3.1 million from a state wrongful imprisonment fund in 2024.

Washington was 25 when he was accused of fatally shooting Faheem “Bobo” Ali, 17, during a dispute over illegal drugs. No gun or other physical evidence was recovered from the scene, other than the bullet that killed Ali. Washington and two witnesses called in his defense identified another man, Lawrence Thomas, as the shooter. But Washington was convicted, largely on the eyewitness testimony of bystander Otis Robinson, who’d been just 12 at the time.

In 1996, nearly 10 years after he first gave his identification, Robinson recanted his testimony, claiming that it was coerced by Baltimore Police Department ...

A $45 million wrongful conviction award to an exonerated Ohio prisoner was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on May 2, 2025. Miami Township and its Police Department (MTPD) had challenged the verdict, claiming that Det. Matthew Moore acted in bad faith and outside the scope of his employment when he engaged in misconduct that resulted in Roger Dean Gillispie’s wrongful 1988 conviction. But the Court rejected those claims, finding no error in the verdict, nor in a lower court’s ruling that the Township must indemnify Moore and pay the award on his behalf.

In 1988, Gillispie had been fired from his job at General Motors when former supervisor Richard Wolfe suggested to MTPD that Gillispie might be the suspect they were seeking in a series of sexual assaults against a trio of victims. Because Wolfe was a former MTPD officer, Chief Thomas Angel took his suggestion seriously and ordered Gillispie investigated. But Det. Gary Bailey and his supervisor, Sgt. Steve Fritz, “found that Gillispie did not meet the victims’ descriptions and had no criminal history,” as the Court later recalled.

In 1990, after the two detectives had left MTPD, Angel assigned the case to ...

On June 18, 2024, City Commissioners in San Jose, California, voted to approve a settlement paying $12 million to Lionel Rubalcalva, 45, who spent 17 years wrongfully incarcerated for a 2002 gang shooting that he didn’t commit. 

Rubalcalva was arrested on April 8, 2002, for a drive-by shooting three days earlier that left 19-year-old Raymond Rodriguez paralyzed from the waist down. A Norteño street gang member, Rodriguez told detectives that he had most likely been targeted by members of the rival Sureño gang. Both he and his mother said they didn’t suspect Rubalcalva, who was not a rival and had once belonged to another Norteño group. Cell tower data also confirmed Rubalcalva’s alibi—that he was driving to a movie date 45 miles away in Hollister at the time of the shooting.

Nevertheless, police pressured ­Rodriguez and three others to testify that Rubalcalva was the shooter, after which the officials also falsely claimed that the identification was made without coercion. When Rodriguez later began to waiver, they paid him off, moving him and his mother to a nicer neighborhood—details that the office of Santa Clara County District Attorney George Kennedy never shared with Rubalcalva’s defense attorneys. 

Rubalcalva was convicted in ...

The city of Durham, North Carolina agreed on May 20, 2024, to pay $7.75 million to resolve the wrongful conviction claim of exonerated prisoner Darryl Howard. He spent almost 24 years in prison before a federal jury agreed that former Durham cop Darrell Dowdy improperly manipulated evidence used to convict him. In addition to the payout, the City spent $5 million defending Howard’s lawsuit.

Howard was convicted in 1995 of strangling Doris Washington and her 13-year-old daughter Nishonda and setting their apartment on fire. Both victims had been sexually assaulted, police determined, but evidence was recovered only from Doris Washington—and it didn’t match to Howard. Then-Assistant District Attorney Mike Nifong brushed away any concerns over that, letting Dowdy tell jurors that semen found in the 13-year-old’s vagina and rectum had probably been left earlier in the week by her boyfriend. 

That’s right: They argued that no sexual assault had even been suspected because the young teen couple had probably engaged in consensual anal sex.

Nifong also failed to disclose that Doris Washington had been sexually assaulted, too. Instead he argued that she sold drugs for Howard, a neighbor who killed her over money she owed. Witnesses offered inconsistent testimony ...

In November 2024, a Massachusetts jury awarded $13 million to former state prisoner Michael Sullivan, 64, as compensation for his wrongful conviction for a 1986 armed robbery and murder. Sullivan’s case involved false laboratory test results, as well as a prosecutorial plea bargain that obtained false testimony from the real murderer.

Sullivan was convicted by a jury of the armed robbery and first-degree murder of Wilfred McGrath. Initially, police had another suspect, Gary Grace. Overwhelming forensic evidence—including traces of blood on a towel and an electric extension cord similar to that found with McGrath’s body—were found in Grace’s apartment. Grace’s fingerprints and McGrath’s blood and hair were found in Sullivan’s vehicle, which Emil Petrla borrowed on the evening of McGrath’s murder. Police arrested and charged Grace with murder and armed robbery.

During questioning by police, Grace acknowledged that McGrath died in his apartment. Nonetheless, Grace maintained his innocence and implicated Sullivan, Petrla, and Steven Angier. The prosecution struck a deal with Grace; it withdrew the indictments against him in return for his testimony against the others and a guilty plea to “accessory after the fact.”

At a March 1987 trial in Middlesex County Superior Court, Grace offered as evidence a ...

by David M. Reutter

The City of Philadelphia agreed on November 3, 2023, to pay $9.1 million to settle a wrongful conviction lawsuit brought by Walter Ogrod, 59, a former state prisoner exonerated of murder and released after more than 28 years of wrongful incarceration—including 23 years on death row. ...

Former New York prisoner Ricardo Jimenez, 55, filed suit in federal court for the Southern District of New York on August 2, 2023, accusing New York City and three former officers with its Police Department (NYPD), as well as the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office (DAO), of violating his civil rights when they railroaded him into a murder conviction of which he was later exonerated. The suit seeks $50 million in compensation for 16 years of wrongful imprisonment that followed.

Jimenez was convicted of a brazen July 1989 murder at the Bronx’s Whitestone Cinemas, in which 20-year-old Sean Worrell was shot to death during a screening of Batman. Initial witness accounts described an argument between Worrell and his friends and another man while they stood in line for popcorn. Concession stand workers described all involved as Black men, noting both victim and shooter spoke with Jamaican accents.

Esco Blaylock, 15, who also worked at the theater, initially didn’t give a detailed description of the shooter. However, he later claimed that he knew the shooter as “Leon,” a Black man with light skin and the ability to mimic a Jamaican accent. Though he later changed his story and said he ...

The state of Michigan has agreed to pay former prisoner Jeff Titus, 71, a total of $1.03 million for nearly 21 years he spent incarcerated for killing two hunters before his convictions were overturned. Titus, who consistently maintained his innocence, then became eligible for compensation from the state’s wrongful conviction fund, which pays out $50,000 for each year spent wrongfully imprisoned. State Court of Claims Judge James Redford officially approved the settlement on August 23, 2023.

“Our goal is to hold accountable those who are responsible for the harm done to Mr. Titus,” said Novi attorney Wolfgang Mueller, who represented Titus. “The state’s acknowledgment of his wrongful conviction is a start.”

Titus was convicted of fatally shooting hunters Doug Estes, 33, and Jim Bennett, 37, near his Kalamazoo County property in 1990. Over three decades later, his life sentence was overturned when authorities acknowledged that Titus’ lawyer at his 2002 trial never received a crucial police file containing information about another suspect, Thomas Dillon, an Ohio serial killer responsible for five murders between 1989 and 1992—all victims killed while hunting, fishing or jogging. Dillon died in prison in 2011.

The failure to give Titus’ defense this information violated his constitutional ...

A year after their murder convictions were tossed and they were freed from an Illinois prison where they’d spent 26 years, a pair of brothers got a certificate of innocence from a state court on May 31, 2023. Cook County Circuit Court Judge Erica Reddick also offered an apology to Juan Hernandez, 46, and his brother Rosendo, 44, for their time spent wrongfully imprisoned.

The pair walked out of Dixon Correctional Center on July 15, 2022, after prosecutors agreed to drop all charges against them. Why? Because they had been brought by now-retired Chicago Police Department (CPD) Det. Reynaldo Guevera at the behest of his partner, Joseph Miedzianowski, who suspected the brothers of interfering in a drug operation he was running.

Miedzianowksi was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to life without parole in 2001. Guevara took his CPD pension and retired to Texas in 2005. After fellow CPD cop Bill Dorsch blew the whistle on Guevera and Miedzianowski’s extortion—shaking down innocent suspects with threats of prosecution—the convictions they obtained started falling like dominoes. [See: PLN, Dec. 2019, p.26.] So far, prosecutors have dropped charges in 30 cases, including eight people freed in a mass exoneration in 2022. The city ...