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Tag: wrongful conviction

  • Amanda Knox: No Happy Ending To My Story

    Amanda Knox: No Happy Ending To My Story

    While Amanda Knox and her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito were acquitted last week of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, she now says that there is no happy ending to her story.

    Amanda Knox spent almost four years in Italian prison, finally returning home to Seattle in 2011, but even then her fight was not over.

    In an open letter to the Seattle Times, Amanda Knox described being “almost entirely lost” at times during her fight. She spoke of “so many years of trial and uncertainty.”

    But her own ordeal is not what bothers her the most about the whole situation.

    “I am acutely aware, however, that this story does not have a happy ending. Unlike a wrongful conviction, which can be overturned, nothing will ever bring Meredith Kercher back to her family and loved ones.”

    Because she feels she has been given a new lease on life, but knows the weight of her story, Amanda Knox vows to use her freedom to help others.

    “Whatever the future holds for me, I know that I must give back. I survived because my dear family gave up their lives to be with me in Italy, because scores of friends donated their resources, because my lawyers worked tirelessly to bring attention to the evidence that exonerated me, because strangers — from world-renowned DNA experts to former FBI crime-scene investigators to everyday citizens — saw the injustice in my case and spoke out, and because kind residents of Seattle gave me jobs to help me financially while I tried to clear my name. I will do everything I can to pay forward all everyone has done for me.

    “I am all too aware of how lucky I am to have received such strong support. I am also aware that countless other wrongfully convicted persons do not have such support. I will work to give a voice to those individuals. I will do this because I know how a wrongful conviction can destroy one’s life and because we best honor crime victims by ensuring that the actual perpetrators are brought to justice.”

  • Gilford Beatty Went To Jail For 5 Robberies He Didn’t Commit; How Could 5 Eyewitnesses Be Wrong?

    Gilford Beatty, a man from Houston, Texas, was charged with five robberies that he did not commit. The legal troubles all began when he received a phone call from a bonding company.

    The company left a message on his mobile phone saying that he had two outstanding warrants of arrest for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. The problems did not stop there. Beatty was arrested on the account of three more robbery charges, bringing the total to five.

    Beatty said that the legal troubles he faced made his family scared and brought them pain and suffering.

    The string of robberies were said to have taken place in various mobile phone stores around Humble, Texas. Beatty kept on telling authorities that he was not the man they were looking for, but his efforts were futile.

    According to the Harris County court documents, Beatty was the common denominator among all the crimes. Additionally, five eyewitnesses identified Beatty as the robber.

    Beatty was put at the scene of the crime when a surveillance video showed him at a location near one of the mobile phone stores. Employees of the mobile phone store also had a record of his driver’s license.

    The false accusations caused Beatty his job. He also spent six days in jail and had to pay $15,000 on bail.

    The robbery cases against him started to crumble when detectives did further inspection of each crime. When one of the crimes happened, Beatty was paying for his bail. On another crime, he was present at his workplace. Investigators also gathered his cellphone records, and they found out that Beatty was located at least 10 miles away from each store when the crimes happened.

    With the evidence collected, the charges against Beatty were finally dismissed. However, it happened a little too late, as he was already five months into the ordeal before results came out.

    According to prosecutors and detectives, the system did work, since charges were dropped against Beatty. For Beatty, however, the pain he and his family had to go through was too much. “All mixed emotions; angry, sad, everything,” he said.

    Authorities say that the real person responsible for the crimes has not yet been caught.

    The Problem With Eyewitness Testimony


    Image via YouTube

  • Wrongly Convicted Man Freed After 25 Years

    Wrongly Convicted Man Freed After 25 Years

    Tuesday was a good day for Glenn Ford, 64. After being wrongly convicted of a crime, and spending nearly 30 years on death row, a judge finally vacated the conviction, allowing Ford to walk free from prison.

    Ford was found guilty, in 1984, for the alleged murder of 56-year-old Isadore Rozeman, a jeweler that Ford worked for occasionally. Ford has always denied the accusations, and has been on death row since August 1988.

    As he was walking out of the gates of the maximum security prison at Angola, Ford was confronted by reporters, who asked him how it felt to be a free man after all of these years. “It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It feels good,” Ford said.

    New evidence, proving that Ford did not take part in the murder and wasn’t even present at the time, led State District Judge Ramona Emanuel to void his conviction.

    “We are very pleased to see Glenn Ford finally exonerated, and we are particularly grateful that the prosecution and the court moved ahead so decisively to set Mr. Ford free,” Gary Clements and Aaron Novod, the attorneys for Ford, said in a statement on Tuesday. They explained that Ford’s trial had been “compromised by inexperienced counsel and by the unconstitutional suppression of evidence, including information from an informant”.

    While Ford is thrilled to be a free man, he admits that he will always harbor resentment for those who took those years away from him. “Yeah, cause, I’ve been locked up almost 30 years for something I didn’t do,” Ford said. “Thirty years, 30 years of my life if not all of it. I can’t go back and do anything that I should’ve been doing when I was 35, 38 and 40 – stuff like that. My son when I left was a baby, now they’re grown men with babies.”

    Although no one can give him back the time he has lost with his family, a Louisiana law calls for compensation for those who were convicted and later exonerated. The law states that the person shall receive $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration with up to a maximum of $250,000. It adds that the person will receive up to $80,000 for loss of “life opportunities.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • NYC Settles Suit With Wrongly Jailed Man for $6.4 Million

    It happens every day–people arrested for crimes they did not commit–and the system lets them down. The statistics are staggering on the number of wrongly imprisoned inmates. Statistics show that in the U.S. alone, over 10,000 people each year are wrongly imprisoned.

    Truthfully, many want to believe that the goal of the justice system is to provide a fair trial, at least in the U.S., and to allow the system to judge right from wrong. But the legal system has failed many people. Whether evidence was concealed, or a person was framed, or even arrested by corrupted law enforcement, jailing someone who is innocent happens all too often.

    What is most disturbing is when someone is wrongly imprisoned and spends years in prison. The appeals and court system sometimes goes awry, leaving innocent people to basically ‘rot in prison’.

    It happened to David Ranta – a man who was framed by a rogue detective and served 23 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

    That man has sued the City of New York for this indiscretion and will receive a $6.4 million settlement that came before a civil rights lawsuit was even filed, lawyers involved in the case said on Thursday.

    Ranta and his attorney filed a $150 million claim that was settled by the city comptroller’s office without ever involving the city’s legal department. The lawyers involved in the negotiations described it as a “groundbreaking” decision that acknowledged the overwhelming guilt on the part of the city.

    The City’s quick acceptance of liability in the high-profile conviction is also extremely important, because a series of wrongful conviction claims are expected to follow, by men who were sent to prison due to the unfair and illegal work of the detective, Louis Scarcella. He has been accused of inventing confessions, coercing witnesses, and recycling informers.

    “While no amount of money could ever compensate David for the 23 years that were taken away from him, this settlement allows him the stability to continue to put his life back together,” Mr. Ranta’s lawyer, Pierre Sussman, said. “We are now focusing our efforts on pursuing an unjust conviction claim with the State of New York.”

    Image via YouTube