Innocence

Six people on North Carolina’s death row have been found innocent since I’ve been here.

In 2001, a jury found Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne not guilty of murdering a police officer. But, thanks to a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a judge sentenced both men to life in prison anyway. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Virginia granted Richardson a new hearing to prove his innocence.

The Santa Clara County district attorney’s name has been floated for the role of the state’s top prosecutor despite his use of the death penalty against people of color.

As COVID-19 deaths mount in Michigan prisons, the review of questionable convictions has slowed, leaving prisoners vulnerable to the disease.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project was seeking the exoneration of Rudolph Sutton when he died on April 8 from complications related to COVID-19.

Sharon Fahy, whose daughter was murdered in 1988, asked the court to release Walter Ogrod, the man convicted in her killing.

Eric Schmitt should follow the lead of a Pennsylvania prosecutor who acknowledged that a man deserved a new trial, even when it meant reversing a murder conviction.

Convicted in 1982 in a murder case in which exculpatory evidence was not shared with his attorneys, Wendell Griffin now calls on State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby to clear his name.

With Daniel Harawa, assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

The poor healthcare that Bobbie Jean Johnson received during her more than 40 years in prison contributed to her death, family members say.

In these last two months of 2019, one man has been executed and two others are facing execution despite claims that they can show they don’t belong on death row.

Police and prosecutors framed a father of four in a 2007 murder case with local and national political implications.

A nearly 30-year-old New York Times Magazine profile of the infamous prosecutor may reveal as much about Linda Fairstein as Ava DuVernay‘s acclaimed new Netflix series.

Attorneys for a man exonerated in a Baltimore murder say detectives suppressed exculpatory evidence and that the police’s homicide unit has a pattern and practice of similar conduct in decades of cases.

William J. Richards was cleared in the death of his wife. But he says he was the victim of medical neglect while he was behind bars, which led to a cancer diagnosis becoming terminal. Now he’s suing.

The murder convictions of two Kentucky men have been thrown out after new evidence was discovered in their cases. Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey DeWayne Clark will get new trials after a judge found there was no credible evidence that the killing of Rhonda Sue Warford was related to satanic worship. The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the ruling. The […]

In 1996, a 12-year-old girl named Christina Brown was found dead in a Detroit apartment. She had been beaten to death with a toilet tank lid; she’d also been stabbed. Lamarr Monson — who had been living with and dealing drugs with Brown thinking she was older — came home and found her dead. He called for the neighbors to […]

A lawsuit filed against the city of Louisville by a man exonerated after serving 14 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit will go forward. U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson ruled that the man, Kerry Porter, had “compelling evidence” that police possessed information that someone else, Juan Leotis Sanders, had murdered truck driver Tyrone Camp— […]

Tatyana Hargrove is not a 5’10”, 170 pound bald man with a goatee. But that didn’t stop Hargrove, a 5’2″, 120 pound 19-year-old, from being arrested by Bakersfield, California police on June 18, even though the person cops were looking for was older, taller, heavier, and a different gender. The only similarity between Hargrove and […]

Defense lawyers are asking a judge in North Carolina to hold Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell in contempt over allegations that he has failed to release files relevant to the investigation and prosecution of Mark Carver. Carver was convicted of strangling University of North Carolina student Irina Yarmolenko in 2011 and sentenced to life without parole. […]

On Monday, July 3, 2017, a Superior Court judge granted Mark Carver’s request for an evidentiary hearing, which will be held in September. Carver claims he was wrongly convicted of the 2008 death of Irina Yarmolenko, a UNC Charlotte student. As previously discussed here, Carver’s attorney, Chris Mumma of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, has alleged […]

Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore has acknowledged that the satanic child sex abuse crimes that have kept Dan and Fran Keller in prison for over a generation probably never happened.

It was the crime that caused the greatest basketball player in history to become a minor league baseball player who couldn’t hit a curve ball. And 20 years later, doubt has emerged over whether the man convicted of killing Michael Jordan’s father is actually the one who pulled the trigger.