Alejandro Dominguez, who spent four years in prison for a rape he did not commit, was awarded $9 million by a federal jury after DNA evidence cleared him of the charges.
Dominguez, now 33, was 16 years old when he was convicted of the 1989 home invasion and rape in Waukegan, Illinois, and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Dominguez was released after serving half his sentence with time off for good behavior.
DNA tests later showed that Dominguez could not have been the source of the semen recovered from the victim, and a judge overturned his conviction in 2002. He was pardoned by the governor in 2005.
Dominguez then filed suit, claiming that Waukegan police violated his due process rights to a fair trial. Jon Loevy, who represented Dominguez in his civil trial against the city of Waukegan and now retired police Lt. Paul Hendley, said police pushed the rape victim to pick Dominguez out of a one-person lineup.
As a result of the wrongful conviction, Dominguez said that he had difficulty finding a job, was hassled by immigration, and was forced to register as a sex offender.
"It’s a day for justice,” said Loevy after the jury ...
Nicole Harris, Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown have lived through their own nightmares of injustice. All three were wrongfully convicted of the heinous murders of children. Combined, they spent nearly 70 years in prison before being exonerated and forced to adapt to a world that had left them behind.
But their cases represent two different eras in the criminal justice system: one in which DNA evidence has reversed some of the most horrific miscarriages of justice of the last several decades—and rightfully dominated headlines about exonerations—and a new era that is shining a light on wrongful convictions won by false confessions, unreliable witnesses, bunk science and prosecutorial misconduct.
In late September 1983, half-brothers McCollum and Brown—then 19 and 15, respectively—were arrested for raping and murdering 11-year-old Sabrina Buie, who had been found in a soybean field in Red Springs, North Carolina, beaten with sticks and suffocated with her own underwear.
The crime was so vicious and wicked that in 1994, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—in response to then-Justice Harry Blackmun's declaration that he opposed capital punishment—cited Buie's murder as a case that clearly warranted the death penalty.
"How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that," Scalia ...
Over the years, Prison Legal News and its parent non-profit organization, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), have filed dozens of censorship lawsuits against state prison systems and county jails, as well as numerous public records suits. [See: PLN, May 2015, p.12]. More recently, HRDC has represented the families of deceased prisoners in wrongful death complaints against corrections officials, and also represented a former prisoner who was pregnant and lost her baby due to inadequate medical care at a CCA-run jail. [See: PLN, Dec. 2014, p.28].
HRDC has now begun taking wrongful conviction cases, partnering with the Chicago law firm Loevy & Loevy to represent former Illinois state prisoner Jermaine Walker.
Walker, 39, a student at Fisk University in Tennessee prior to his wrongful imprisonment, filed a federal civil rights action on July 7, 2016 that accused current and former Chicago police officers of beating and planting drugs on him during a February 2006 traffic stop. Walker, a PLN subscriber while incarcerated, filed for a Certificate of Innocence after Cook County Judge Catherine Haberkorn ordered his immediate release from prison in March 2016. He had served ten years.
The Certificate of Innocence was granted on April 27, 2016. ...
In 2007, prisoner Aaron Willey filed a pro se federal civil rights lawsuit against guards employed by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, alleging harassment, inadequate nutrition, theft of legal documents, malicious prosecution, false imprisonment and unsanitary conditions of confinement.
Willey claimed that after he refused ...
The District of Columbia paid $950,000 to settle the lawsuit of Joseph S. Heard for unlawful imprisonment.
On November 15, 1998, Heard, a deaf man, was arrested for unlawful entry into a George Washington University building. The case was dismissed October 13, 1999 with an order from the court for ...
A $1.5 million settlement was reached in a lawsuit brought by a Michigan man who spent 13 years in prison for a rape charge based on faulty bite mark evidence.
Two weeks before the case was set to proceed to trial, Michael Cristini reached a deal with The City of ...
An interesting collaboration between medical and law professionals, under the leadership of University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel R. Gross, led to the application of medical statistical analysis to exonerations of death-sentenced prisoners, in order to estimate the number of innocent defendants who receive the death penalty. The report, published in April 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal, estimated the rate of wrongful capital convictions at 4.1%, or 1 in 25. The 95% confidence level of the study was 2.8 to 5.2%. This was the first report to use “solid and appropriate statistical methods” to estimate the error rate in capital convictions.
Death penalty cases were studied because they are unique among criminal prosecutions, in that they receive more serious scrutiny at every step of the process from initial crime scene investigation to execution. Death-sentenced prisoners usually have the assistance of attorneys until the execution is carried out. Presumably, jurors take their task more seriously in capital cases, and judges apply greater scrutiny when a person’s life is at stake.
This additional scrutiny means the rate of exonerations of death-sentenced prisoners may be close to the actual rate of ...
Kickstarter and other crowdfunding websites provide an interesting option for prisoners with imagination and originality to explore career-expanding opportunities, raise money and gain access to a commodity often in short supply behind bars – hope.
Basically, crowdfunding involves developing online campaigns for specific projects, charitable causes or services, or to develop certain products. People who want to support a campaign can donate funds, from as little as $1 to as much as they want. Hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of people may join together to support and fund a campaign, and once the project achieves its target funding amount the money is paid to the campaign organizer so they can make the project a reality.
Kickstarter, founded in 2009, is a popular crowdfunding site that specializes in entrepreneurial campaigns with an artistic focus, while other sites like GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, Fundly and RocketHub are more flexible. Some sites allow campaigns for legal defense expenses, bail money and prison ministries. Almost all of these services charge fees ranging from around 4 to 9 percent of the money collected during the campaign; some are all-or-nothing, meaning the entire amount of the project must be funded or the campaign is cancelled. Donors ...
The word “first” was applied to Craig M. Watkins multiple times after his election to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in 2006. He was the county’s first black D.A., the first D.A. who had been a public defender before being elected prosecutor and the first D.A. to establish a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in Dallas.
The CIU turned the culture at the prosecutors’ office on its head. Previously, convictions were to be had at all costs and defended to the end. Henry Wade, one of Watkins’ predecessors, was famously quoted as having said that it was easy to convict a guilty man; it was the innocent ones who were a bit more difficult. That reflected a culture where the only thing that mattered was winning a conviction, not the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
The culture changed when Watkins set up the CIU. Due to the “save it all” policy at the Southwest Institute for Forensic Sciences, Dallas County was sitting on a mound of forensic evidence from past cases. So the CIU began an internal audit of the over 400 cases in which a prisoner had requested DNA testing.
“There was an unspoken desire for us to ...
By James Kilgore, Truthout
How many US prisoners are wrongfully convicted? And how many are technically "guilty" but still should not be locked up?
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After more than three decades of sleepwalking, mainstream America is waking up to the fact that the dragnet of mass incarceration has captured lots of innocent people. In the past few months, media productions framed around this notion of innocence have gone viral. Millions of "Making a Murderer" viewers are following the case of Stephen Avery, a middle-aged white man, as he appeals a questionable murder conviction. Avery previously spent 18 years in prison for a crime he definitely did not commit. An online petition requesting President Obama to exonerate Avery and free him immediately has drawn more than half a million signatures.
On the audio front, "Serial" has shocked the podcasting world by receiving over 80 million downloads. The 12-part series focuses on the murder of 18-year-old Hae Min Lee in 1999 in Baltimore. The courts convicted her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, of the crime and sentenced him to ...
