INNOCENT PERSONS CONVICTED  Part Two

As I said in my earlier article; Being accused of committing a crime that you didn’t commit is a horrendous event in anyone’s personal life. The experience is even worse when you are facing your execution.

As I also  said in my earlier article, I was called upon to  investigated three murder cases and I  proved that the one man facing life in prison and the other two facing the hangman’s noose were all  innocent.

An innocent man was hanged in Canada and when I reported  information to Parliament that the police admitted that the wrong man was hanged, the members of the Canadian Parliament  subsequently abolished capital punishment. The UK also abolished capital punishment when the UK Parliament learned that an innocent man was hanged.

How many persons  are sentenced to death in the United States for crimes they did not commit? A new study believes the figure is 1 in every 25—or 4.1 percent. Since 1973, 144 people on death row have been exonerated. As a percentage of all death sentences, that's just 1.6 percent. But if the innocence rate is 4.1 percent, more than twice the rate of exoneration, the study suggests what most people assumed but dreaded: An untold number of innocent people have been executed. Further, the majority of those wrongfully sentenced to death are likely to languish in prison and never be freed

How many innocent persons were executed in the United States? Death penalty opponents say there is no way to know how many innocent people have been executed in the USA.

Nate Fields is among those exonerated inmates. In 2009, he was acquitted of a double murder after spending almost 20 years in prison, including more than 11 years on death row.

DeLuna was accused of killing a petrol station clerk, Wanda Lopez, in 1983. He was executed in Texas in 1989 A Columbia Law School report on the execution found significant problems with the conviction, particularly that it was based on the testimony of a single, unreliable eyewitness The report says another man had admitted to killing Lopez, that DeLuna had an ineffective defence lawyer and that he had suffered during his execution due to a problem with the injection The five-year investigation into DeLuna's case found him not guilty of the crime he was executed for, and suggested that police had botched the investigation.

You may recall that I mentioned in the previous article, that on two occasions, the police botched the investigations. I re-investigated the murders and proved that the accused were innocent.  One man was serving life in prison and the other was facing being hanged.

In 1992, Todd Willingham was convicted of arson murder in Texas. He was believed to have intentionally set a fire that killed his three kids. In 2004, he was put to death. Unfortunately, the Texas Forensic Science Commission later found that the evidence was misinterpreted, and they concluded that none of the evidence used against Willingham was valid. As it turns out, the fire really was accidental.

About ten years ago two unconnected university investigations into convicted prisoners found that AT least 20–25% of prisoners in the UK were innocent of the charges against them! Not that they were totally innocent of course, but certainly shouldn't be in prison as charged. Mostly because of procedural errors or inaccuracies in charges. It would be both embarrassing and expensive (costs and compensation) to the legal system, find and correct these miscarriages of justice and most people could not afford the legal fees anyway.

A Suffolk County Superior Court judge had vacated the double murder convictions stemming from the 1992 slaying of two brothers after prosecutors argued the man sentenced to life in prison for the crimes was not the killer. of the wo brothers.

The case against the innocent man depended on identifications by two so-called eyewitnesses who had lengthy criminal records and pending cases. They accused an innocent man of the two murders in hopes that their pending charges would be withdrawn.

Additional testing later showed, however, that the “multiple drops of blood on Junior Williams’ sweatshirt contain a major DNA profile that matches Roosevelt ‘Tony’ Price who was the only plausible explanation for how Tony’s blood landed on Williams’ sweatshirt was if Williams was standing in close proximity to Tony during the shooting,”

A man who spent nearly 25 years in prison for a Brooklyn murder that took place while he was vacationing in Disney World was set free in a highly emotional hearing.

"The day is finally here. I've dreamt about it many nights," Jonathan Fleming said as he walked out of court. "I'm finally a free man.

New evidence  would have confirmed his alibi for the August 1989 slaying in a Williamsburg project  which was unearthed during a review of the case by the Brooklyn district attorney's office.

The new evidence had included a phone receipt from an Orlando hotel showing he was there just hours before the murder and a report from local police, which interviewed hotel staff who remembered him.

. Raymond Towler, who spent 29 years in prison, walked out of the Justice Center in Cleveland after his life sentence for a rape in 1981 was vacated. To and charged with crimes they didn’t commit. wler was found innocent through new DNA testing.

Inn the next article, I will tell you about other innocent persons who were arrested and charged with crimes they didn’t commit.