On July 22, 2014, a man who spent 17 days in jail for a false rape accusation had his lawsuit against the Sheriff's office dismissed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court upheld the summary judgment order of the U.S. District Court for Nebraska, which held that the faulty police investigation did not amount to a constitutional violation.

The case began in the early morning hours of November 24, 2011, when Jennifer Valenta reported she was raped. Officer's from the Gage County Sheriff's Office met Valenta at the hospital and took her story. Valenta said her assailant was a man named "Elliot," who she had met only a few days earlier.

"Elliot" was Elliot Hawkins, who told the police that he had met Valenta through her sister, and the Valenta agreed to perform sex acts for Hawkins for money.

Valenta refused to complete a rape kit after she says she was told too much time had passed for the kit to be effective. Officers then had Valenta call Hawkins to try to elicit a confession from him. Hawkins only admitted they were together that night, but denied the rape and Valenta's accusation that three other men were ...

In a case of mistaken identity, an innocent man residing in Memphis, Tennessee was extradited to a regional jail in Wise County, Virginia where he remained incarcerated for more than three months. Once the Commonwealth’s Attorney could be convinced of the mistaken identity, the three indictments were dismissed against the plaintiff.

In 2005, a member of the drug task force in Big Stone Gap, Virginia agreed to three controlled drug buys through a confidential informant (C.I.) between November 29, 2005 and December 16, 2005. The C.I. identified the defendant by name and description – an old man who drove a jeep with a stolen Tennessee license plate.

The defendant relayed this information to the drug task force office, which, in turn, provided a social security number of the alleged suspected drug dealer, and a Big Stone Gap, Virginia post office address.

On May 31, 2006, armed with the information provided by the Defendant a Grand Jury returned three separate indictments relating to the three drug transactions with the C.I. Consequently, the Circuit Court of Wise County, Virginia issued three separate bench warrants.

Nearly six months later. The Plaintiff, who was living in Memphis, Tennessee became aware of the outstanding arrest ...

A Texas man, Michael Phillips, 57, recently became the first person to be cleared of a crime by DNA testing he did not request.

Phillips was accused of raping a white teenage girl at a Dallas motel in 1990. The victim, who had partially removed her attacker’s face mask during the rape, identified Phillips as her assailant. Phillips told his lawyer that he was innocent, but the lawyer advised him to take a plea bargain because a black man accused of raping a white teen had no chance of winning before a Dallas jury. Phillips spent 12 years in prison before being released in 2002. In 2004, he was returned to prison for six months for failing to register as a sex offender.

Phillips is wheelchair bound and seriously ill with sickle cell anemia. He lives in a nursing home. His father died while he was in prison. Trying to clear his name was one of the last things on his mind when he was contacted by the Conviction Integrity Unit which was started by Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins in 2007. The unit had run DNA recovered from the victim through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System which ...

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia has set up the first federal unit nationwide unit to internally identify, investigate, and possible wrongful convictions, U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen Jr. said.  “This new unit will work to uncover historical injustices and to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to prevent such tragedies in the future,” he said.

The formation of the new unit comes in the wake of the vacating of five wrongful convictions resulting from faulty evidence testing or exonerations based upon new DNA evidence.  A four-year review was recently concluded of more than 2,000 FBI evidence files that used now-discredited hair or fiber evidence to establish guilt.

Exonerations of the wrongfully convicted defendants are still wending their way through the criminal justice system, a recent story by the Washington Post indicated. Donald Gates was one of those who were erroneously convicted.  He was found guilty of a 1982 rape and murder based upon hair evidence, but proven innocent in 2009 on the basis of DNA testing.

Prisoner rights advocates such as Shawn Ambrust of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, cautiously welcomed the development, but expressed reservations about the project’s transparency if it was “just ...

The Florida Legislature passed a bill in the closing minutes of its 2014 session that allows a man who served 21 years on a wrongful conviction to seek up to $2 million in compensation.

James Richardson was convicted in the 1967 poisoning deaths of his seven children. Richardson, a black man, was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. Decades later, the babysitter who served the children their last meal confessed she had committed the crime. Although she was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s disease, the governor ordered the case reopened.

A special prosecutor’s investigation concluded Richardson was convicted on the testimony of jail inmates beaten into perjury and via prosecutorial misconduct. That resulted in the court finding no basis for the conviction, and Richardson was released in 1989.

Since his release, Richardson has move to Wichita, Kansas. He attended the legislative session, but as it wound, down a political fight unrelated to the bill that would allow him to seek compensation was among the bills that were suspended by the deadlock. Richardson left for home. The next day, at 9:15 P.M. the legislative passed the bill that would allow Richardson to seek Compensation.

Florida law allows ...

For decades, law enforcement investigations used forensic evidence (i.e. fingerprints, DNA, and ballistics) to include or eliminate suspects. Scientific advances and improvement in forensic analysis have helped to exonerate those convicted of serious crimes. In many cases, forensic biological evidence like DNA was not used. Thus, some individuals convicted sexual assault and homicide may have been eliminated by a forensic analysis. To estimate the rate of such possible wrongful convictions and to identify their predictors, the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded the Urban Institute (UI) to perform retrospective DNA testing of physical evidence in cases where there was a conviction of a sexual assault or homicide and physical evidence was retained. In June 2012, UI issued a report of the study.

UI reviewed data on Virginia homicides and sexual assaults from 1973 to 1987 (over 534,000 cases). 3,000 of them had retained physical evidence and 2100 of them had an identified suspect. 740 of those cases had at least one suspect convicted of a felony.

Of those, 634 cases with 715 convictions (62 cases had multiples suspects) were eligible for this study based on crime type (homicide, sexual assault) and a conviction.

The DNA evidence ...

The town of Ayer, Massachusetts, and five insurance companies have agreed to pay the estate of a man who spent 18 years in prison for a murder he did not commit a total of $3.4 million. A sixth insurance company, Western World Insurance Group, had declined to settle.

Kenneth Waters was convicted in 1983 for the 1980 murder and robbery of Katherina Row, a woman who regularly visited the diner where Waters worked in Ayer. In 2001, however, Waters was freed from prison after his sister, Betty Anne Waters, uncovered DMA evidence which proved her brother wasn't the killer. (See: PLN, December 2009, p. 42.)

Kenneth died just six months after his release from prison from a head injury he suffered when he fell from a 15-foot wall in Rhode Island.

Betty Anne, then 54, said she devoted exactly "half of my life” trying to win her brother's freedom and clear his name. "It's been a long 27 years,” she said.

Following Kenneth's conviction, Betty Anne, a waitress and a mother of two, went to college, earned her law degree, and then started representing Kenneth herself. With the help of the New York-based Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. ...

A former death row inmate who came within weeks of being executed was awarded $14 million by a federal jury in New Orleans after being cleared of his murder conviction.

John Thompson, 40, spent 18 years in prison after being convicted of killing hotel executive Ray Liuzza during a 1984 robbery. Thompson adamantly maintained his innocence during his trial and prison term. Thompson spent most of his 18 years on death row.

Just weeks before Thompson was scheduled to die, a defense investigator discovered a crime lab report which found that the blood type of the robber, which was recovered from the victim's pants, did not match Thompson's.

Based on the newly-discovered evidence, a judge resentenced Thompson to life in prison without parole, but his murder conviction was upheld until a state appeals court later overturned it and ordered a new trial.

Thompson was found not guilty in the retrial.

In the subsequent civil lawsuit, which Thompson filed against Orleans Parish officials and several current and former prosecutors, a federal jury determined that Thompson was entitled to $14 million for the wrongful conviction.

Gordon Cooney, along with fellow attorney Michael Banks, worked for 14 years to win Thompson a retrial ...

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 ...