by Derek Gilna

Congress has passed the wrongful Conviction Tax Act of 2015 with votes from both sides of the aisle, exempting the damage awarded granted the wrongfully convicted from federal tax liability.   According to the Innocence Project, a prisoner-rights organization who has contributed to the exoneration of dozens of wrongfully-convicted and imprisoned individuals, hailed the new law as "the right thing to do."

According to Marvin Anderson, an Innocence Project board member and a twenty-year prisoner who was finally cleared of rape by DNA evidence, said, " It's crazy that, after stealing years of a person's life, providing little if any help with readjusting to the outside world, the government would want to take away the money that is supposed to help the wrongfully convicted rebuild their lives.  As it is, too many states provide inadequate re-entry services for the wrongfully convicted.  It's as though we are supposed to just pick up from where we left off, but it doesn't work that way...I'm happy Congress passed this bill."

Rebecca Brown, Policy Director for the Innocence Project, noted that, "we must do more to address these reentry needs, and the Wrongful Conviction Tax Relief Act of 2015 is an important ...

By Christopher Zoukis

In a scathing opinion, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, awarded a wrongfully detained American citizen $82,500 in damages for false arrest and false imprisonment at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Davino Watson was born in Kingston, Jamaica November 17, 1984. Both of his parents were Jamaican citizens, but after living in America for several years, his father became an American citizen. Watson was 17-years-old at the time, and pursuant to immigration law, he became an American citizen at the same time as his father.

After spending several years in New York State Prison for robbery and drug convictions, Watson was set to be released. Unfortunately for him, the crack ICE deportation team stepped in, decided that he was not an American citizen, and initiated deportation proceedings against him. Based on the files of two Jamaican citizens who were not Watson's parents, ICE detained Watson for a total of 1,273 days before finally realizing that he was an American.

Watson was transferred from New York to Louisiana and eventually to Alabama during his three-and-a-half years of detention. He was eventually released in ...

by Lonnie Burton

Following a trial that began on March 6, 2017, a federal jury awarded a former prisoner more than $13 million after he sued the City of Chicago, seven police officers and two Cook County prosecutors over his wrongful convictions for a 1992 double homicide.

Deon Patrick spent more than two decades in prison before prosecutors dismissed the charges against him in 2014. He filed his wrongful conviction suit in federal court that same year. The jury verdict came just four months after another Chicago man, Nathson “Nate” Fields, was awarded $22 million after spending more than 10 years on death row only to be later cleared of a 1984 double murder. [See: PLN, April 2017, p.30].

Court records show that Jeffrey Lassiter, a drug dealer, and Sharon Haugabook, a prostitute, were shot and killed in Lassiter’s apartment on November 16, 1992. Weeks later, police claimed they had arrested three people for drug possession, two of whom voluntarily implicated themselves, along with Patrick and several others, in the murders. Patrick was arrested the same day, after which the police said a witness picked him out of a lineup as one of the people she saw leaving the ...

by Lonnie Burton

Homophobic police officers in Reno, Nevada framed a mentally ill woman for a murder she did not commit by labeling her a lesbian, withholding evidence and coercing a confession from her, her attorneys claimed in a lawsuit filed in August 2016. The woman spent 35 years in prison until 2014, when DNA evidence finally cleared her of a 1976 murder.

Cathy Woods, now 67, was arrested after she “confessed” to killing a nursing student while confined in a mental institution. After Woods’ mental health counselor broke patient-doctor confidentiality by reporting Woods to the police, the complaint alleges, she was tried and convicted in 1980 for killing 19-year-old Michelle Mitchell, a freshman at the University of Nevada in Reno. Woods was convicted again in 1985 after the state Supreme Court ordered a new trial in her case.

During her decades in prison, Woods, who was reportedly schizophrenic, maintained her innocence and recanted her confession, which she said was coerced in exchange for a better room at the mental hospital. A break came in 2014, when a cigarette butt found at the scene of the crime was tested for DNA. The test results revealed that a San Francisco-area serial ...

by Lonnie Burton

In 2008 a lawsuit filed by a Mexican citizen who had obtained lawful permanent resident status in the United States and was later detained while trying to return to the U.S. from Mexico was settled for $99,000. The settlement came after a failed government motion to dismiss ...

by Lonnie Burton

On October 1, 2013, U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, signed a stipulated order dismissing a lawsuit filed by a man who was unlawfully detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) despite the ...

by Lonnie Burton

On November 2, 2004, U.S. District Judge Charles K. Wolff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, signed an order approving the settlement in, and dismissing, a case of an Iowa man who was unlawfully held on an immigration detainer for five days. ...

by Lonnie Burton

Rennison Vern Castillo served honorably in the United States Army. He received the National Defense Service Medal and an Army Service Ribbon. While serving the country, Castillo was sworn in as a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1998. Castillo was honorably discharged from the Army in 2003. And ...

by Derek Gilna

Shawnnon Hale, 24, wrongful accused of felony rape and jailed for 61 days, was released from custody in Denver, Colorado in early 2015 when the police crime lab acknowledged it had mislabeled a DNA sample that incorrectly identified him as the perpetrator. As a result of his arrest and incarceration, Hale filed a federal civil rights suit accusing crime lab technicians Eric Duvall and Brian Pirot of “objectively unreasonable” actions.

The complaint claimed that “Defendants Duvall and Pirot engaged in their respective actions and inaction with reckless disregard and/or gross negligence,” which resulted in Hale’s “unreasonable seizure ... causing him to suffer a loss of freedom, loss of income, reputational damage and mental and emotional distress.”

Hale had steadfastly maintained his innocence both before and after his arrest for sexually assaulting a woman who had been at a party he attended in July 2014, stating he never had contact with her. “No, that’s not possible,” he said. Denver police officers had recovered a cigarette butt that allegedly contained his DNA, but it was discovered after his arrest that the DNA sample had been misidentified by the crime lab.

“The Denver Police Department is in the process of ...

by Christopher Zoukis

Derrick Deacon spent more than 24 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. After having his conviction thrown out by an appeals court and being found not guilty in a subsequent retrial, Deacon, 61, sued the City of New York for malicious prosecution.

 On November 1, 2016, the New York Daily News reported that he had accepted $6 million to settle his claims.

Deacon was charged with and convicted of the April 1, 1989 shooting death of 16-year-old Anthony Wynn in a Brooklyn apartment hallway. The conviction was obtained on the basis of an eyewitness, Abdullah Pickering, who fingered Deacon – reportedly a drug user – in order to collect $1,000 from a Crime Stoppers hotline. Deacon insisted that he was not near the scene of the crime and proclaimed his innocence. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.

The case began to unravel in 2001, when a federal informant, Trevor Brown, told the FBI that minutes after Wynn was murdered, a gang member named Pablo confessed the crime to him. According to Brown, Wynn was killed by Pablo during a botched robbery attempt.

It took eight years, but in 2009, ...