by Chuck Sharman

In a decision that upheld a lower court ruling, the Michigan Court of Appeals said on December 22, 2025, that exonerated former state prisoner Desmond Ricks must use a $7.5 million settlement from a civil suit filed over his wrongful conviction to repay over $1.2 million that he was awarded under the state’s Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act (WICA), MCL 691.1751 et seq.

Ricks was 51 in June 2017 when he was exonerated and released from prison, after serving 24 years and 226 days for the 1992 murder of his friend, Gerry Bennett, 21—a killing that Ricks observed from the parked car that he and Bennett took to the restaurant where the latter was gunned down by an unknown assailant. Detroit cops arrested Ricks for the murder days later, after confiscating a pistol that Ricks’ mother kept under her pillow and matching it to the bullets that killed Bennett. Based on that ballistics match, Ricks was accused, tried and convicted of the slaying. There was just one problem: The bullets that cops gave the ballistics expert who made the match did not come from Bennett’s body.

It was not an innocent mistake, but it …

On November 15, 2025, a man who was once serving a life sentence for murder was elected as the chief record keeper for New Orlean’s criminal court. Calvin Duncan, 62, spent 28 years in prison before winning his freedom in 2011 with the help of Innocence Project New Orleans (now known as Innocence & Justice Louisiana). At the time, Duncan’s murder conviction was vacated in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges; in 2021, he was exonerated by a judge.

While locked up, Duncan became a talented jailhouse lawyer and later, at 60, graduated from law school. In addition to helping out countless other prisoners, Duncan worked with the litigation team that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end non-­unanimous jury convictions in Louisiana and Oregon, which were the only two states that allowed the Jim Crow era practice (though Alabama still sentences prisoners to death on the recommendation of a non-­unanimous jury).

The jailhouse lawyer’s legal advocacy often required him to track down records with court clerks throughout Louisiana. Most of the time, the documents were either online or easily requested, Duncan told The New York Times. But that wasn’t the case in …

by Douglas Ankney

On February 25, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) reversed Oklahoma prisoner Richard Eugene Glossip’s death sentence. This is the second time a death sentence imposed upon Glossip has been overturned. His case wreaks of state corruption, so much so that a bipartisan group of 62 Oklahoma legislators hired an independent law firm to conduct an independent investigation. As of this writing, Glossip remains incarcerated at Oklahoma’s maximum security state prison.

Glossip’s saga began in 1997. Glossip managed a hotel owned by Barry Van Treese. Justin Sneed beat Van Treese to death with a baseball bat inside a room at the hotel. After Sneed was arrested, the police encouraged him to implicate Glossip. But Sneed initially claimed his brother was his accomplice. The police were dissatisfied and insisted it was Glossip. Eventually, Sneed changed his story and implicated Glossip.

As for motive, Sneed stated during his interrogation that the murder was a robbery gone wrong. It was Glossip who convinced Sneed to hit Van Treese while he slept to ensure Van Treese remained unconscious while they took the victim’s money. But when the police said the condition of Van Treese’s …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. 

…

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. …

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 …

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 …