Willie Manning deserves DNA testing before May 7 execution

by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld

Last week the Mississippi Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision denied Willie Manning the opportunity to do DNA testing that could prove he is innocent of the crime that landed him on death row. Tragically, Manning is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday and may never get the opportunity to do the testing that could prove whether he is innocent as he has always maintained.

We urge Gov. Phil Bryant to issue a stay so the testing can be done. While people can differ on whether the death penalty is an appropriate form of punishment, nearly everyone would agree that it should be used only in those cases where we are certain of guilt. DNA testing could provide that certainty or prove, as Manning insists, that he is innocent. It could also, as the Mississippi Supreme Court judges noted in their dissent, provide the identity of alleged second perpetrator who has never been caught.

Eighteen people who served time on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence since it became available two decades ago. One of those men, Kennedy Brewer, was convicted in Mississippi. Like Manning, Brewer was convicted based on circumstantial evidence and unvalidated forensic science. In Brewer’s case, the prosecution relied on widely discredited bite mark testimony, and in Manning’s case the prosecution presented hair microscopy, which because of its unreliability will be subject to a recently announced FBI nationwide review. The DNA evidence in Brewer’s case proved his innocence and identified the real perpetrator who confessed to the crime and another murder for which someone had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to life. Fortunately, that man, Levon Brooks, was also exonerated.

We don’t know what the DNA evidence will ultimately prove in Manning’s case, but there is a good chance that it will be highly probative — and much more reliable than the kind of evidence that was used to convict him of the 1992 murders of Pamela Tiffany Miller and Jon Stephan Steckler. The two students were kidnapped after leaving a party at Mississippi State University and were driven to a remote location and both were shot to death. At trial, there was no physical evidence linking Manning to the crime. The prosecution relied on circumstantial evidence. At one point the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned his conviction because Manning’s lawyers weren’t allowed to fully cross-examine the informant, but the court later reconsidered its decision and let the conviction stand.

Since 1994, Manning has been seeking DNA testing of the rape kit, fingernail scrapings that were recovered from both victims and hairs recovered from the scene. Rape kits and fingernail scrapings are routinely tested today because the testing can prove with near certainty who committed the crime. Before DNA evidence, prosecutors would often rely on hair microscopy to place a defendant at the scene even though the practice was never scientifically validated. After DNA evidence exonerated three people who had been wrongly convicted in part based on this type of evidence, the FBI announced this year that it would undertake a massive review of all cases in which one of its analysts testified about this type of evidence. Given that the FBI performed the hair microscopy in this case, it would seem that Manning’s case should be subject to this review — if he isn’t put to death first.

As the dissenters noted, given that it is alleged that two perpetrators committed the crime, it’s puzzling that the district attorney is so resistant to testing.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has said that the DNA testing is unnecessary because there is other overwhelming evidence of guilt. But appeals courts were also wrong in the cases of all 306 DNA exonerations, including the 18 who served time on death row. DNA testing has the potential to tell us once and for all who committed these two tragic murders, and that’s something we all should want.

- – - – -

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld are co-founders and co-directors of the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent injustice.

Related articles

• Mississippi to Execute Man Without DNA Testing Crucial Evidence (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• Death Row Inmate To Die Tuesday After DNA Testing Denied (medicaldaily.com)
• A Stunning Error in Mississippi (takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Mississippi Denies Inmate DNA Test, Set to Execute Him on Tuesday (gawker.com)
• Willie Manning Will Die in Mississippi Unless YOU Ask for His DNA Test TODAY (badgals-radio.com)

Tab for wrongful convictions in Texas: $65 million and counting

English: Huntsville Unit, Huntsville, TX Español: Unidad de Huntsville, Huntsville, TX (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

State is the most generous in compensating exonerees; legislators ponder changes to safeguard against future false convictions.

By Mike Ward

American-Statesman Staff

For a state perhaps best known as the leader in executing murderers, Texas now has another distinction: It is the most generous in compensating those who were wrongly locked up.

In all, the state has paid more than $65 million to 89 wrongfully convicted people since 1992, according to updated state figures.

And if legislation being discussed at the Texas Capitol becomes law, that tab could soon grow.

“The justice system in Texas had fundamental flaws, and this is the result,” said state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a longtime champion of the falsely imprisoned. “At this point, I don’t think anyone can seriously doubt that we had a problem — a big problem.”

For a hint of how off-track Texas’ justice system once was, and how expensive those mistakes have become for taxpayers, consider the case of Michael Morton, the exonerated former Austin-area resident who served 25 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. A Williamson County court convicted him in 1987 of killing his wife Christine.

Morton, who was 57 when he was freed from prison in 2011, so far has received $1.96 million for his mistaken imprisonment, state records show.

Under a law signed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2009, some exonerees will receive $80,000 each year for the rest of their lives and are eligible for the same health insurance as employees of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, where the ex-prisoners did their time.

Twenty-six other states and the District of Columbia also provide compensation to exonerees — but they pay less, according to statistics compiled by the Innocence Project, a privately funded national initiative that works on behalf of the wrongfully convicted. Currently, Ellis, D-Houston, serves as its board chairman.

Since the first wrongful conviction through DNA was logged in 1989, 65 percent of exonerees nationally have received some form of compensation, according to the Innocence Project.

Continue Reading @ Statesman.com

 

Related articles

• Innocent of Crime, Tainted by Time: Exonorees Struggle (citylimits.org)
• Wrongfully Accused; Wrongly Judged; Wrongfully Imprisoned (deafinprison.wordpress.com)
• Texas Leads U.S. in Executions, Payments to Exonerated Inmates (bloomberg.com)

How Many Innocent People Have We Sent To Prison?

Liz Webster

Reuters/Joshua Lott

When Beverly Monroe met her new neighbors in the free world after spending seven years in a Virginia prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she spoke candidly about her past. “I said I’d been through a crisis,” she says. “People immediately think a divorce or you lost your husband or something like that, which is all terrible enough.”

Monroe did lose her longtime boyfriend, Roger de la Burde, who was found shot to death with his own handgun in 1992. An overzealous state police agent suspected foul play, even though officials initially believed that de la Burde had shot himself. Monroe’s statements to police, which were deemed to be self-incriminating, coupled with an informant who received a deal from the prosecution in exchange for her testimony, formed the basis for the case against her. At 54, the mother of three was charged and convicted of murdering de la Burde and sentenced to twenty-two years at the Pocahontas Correctional Center. Monroe might have served the whole sentence had her attorneys not discovered a collection of concealed exculpatory documents, including a crucial medical examiner’s report from 1999 that strongly suggested that de la Burde had indeed committed suicide. In 2002 a US District Court judge vacated the conviction.

Now in her 70s, Monroe works as an administrative assistant. The lost income and lack of savings from her years behind bars have made retirement a distant dream. “I’ll have to work until I’m 105,” she says. Virginia has not compensated her for the years lost to prison or for her legal expenses. (Her trial cost nearly $200,000.)

“Being innocent in prison is real torture,” Monroe says. “It’s a lasting kind of trauma…. You’re released, and you realize that it didn’t just happen to you—it’s happened to other people who have had it so much worse.”

How many other people? No one knows. The Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn’t track exonerations, so for years that task has fallen to lawyers, academics and activists relying on news reports and legal filings. While the Innocence Project and the Death Penalty Information Center track exonerations, neither group’s database is complete. No single resource has amassed all of the known exoneration cases.

Until now. On May 21, the University of Michigan Law School, in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, released the first-ever National Registry of Exonerations. The searchable online database is the most credible and comprehensive resource on wrongful convictions in the United States. Peter Neufeld, the co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, has called it the “Wikipedia of Innocence.” The registry, which can be viewed at exonerationregistry.org, currently counts 891 cases since 1989, the year of the first exoneration achieved using DNA.

The scope is significant: reliable data on false convictions had been limited to DNA exonerations and death row exonerations. Beverly Monroe doesn’t fit either category, and neither would the vast majority of exonerated prisoners: less than 1 percent of the nation’s prison population is on death row, and DNA evidence applies only to a small fraction of all criminal cases—those with biological evidence like semen, blood, hair and saliva.

In addition to examining “a much broader group of exonerations,” according to University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett, the registry shows “that there are a lot of exonerations that don’t get a lot of press attention.” It also alters the conventional wisdom about how innocent people get convicted. For his 2011 book, Convicting the Innocent, Garrett scoured the first 250 DNA exonerations and identified eyewitness misidentification as the leading cause of those wrongful convictions (as have others). But the larger pool of cases reflected in the registry reveals other trends. According to University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, “perjury or false accusation” is the leading cause of wrongful conviction.

Continue Reading @ The Nation

 

Related articles

• A Terrible Secret: An Introduction to Wrongful Convictions in America (uculr.com)
• What can and should we learn from the new “National Registry of Exonerations”? (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Meet Twenty-Two People Exonerated in 2012 (goodblacknews.org)
• Despite exonerations, eyewitness ID process virtually unchanged (ocregister.com)
• Since 1973, 141 People has Released from DR with Evidence of Innocence (inprisonedwomen.wordpress.com)

Governor Jerry Brown: Grant Clemency for the California Twelve

Petition by

California Innocence Project

Wrongful convictions are a continuing problem in the United States justice system.  The news media is filled with reports where individuals have spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.  Unfortunately, this is only part of the story.

Over the last 13 years, the California Innocence Project (“CIP”) has exonerated 11 individuals who were wrongfully convicted and served a combined total of more than 113 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.  In fact, you may have even heard about their most recent exoneree, Brian Banks.  What you haven’t heard about are the California 12.  CIP has identified 12 innocent clients, many who have been found innocent by a judge, yet remain incarcerated.  On April 27, 2013, CIP will begin a march from San Diego to Sacramento to hand-deliver clemency petitions to the Governor of California on behalf of these clients:

Please sign this petition to encourage Governor Brown to free these wrongfully convicted inmates.  To read more about their cases, visit our website at InnocenceMarch.com.

 

Related articles

• A Terrible Secret: An Introduction to Wrongful Convictions in America (uculr.com)
• California Innocence Project Success Story Pays a Visit (sandiego6.com)

Framing the Guilty?

Preston Hughes is scheduled to be executed this month. Is he innocent of murder, as his defenders claim? Or did police frame a guilty man?

Preston Hughes

By Jordan Smith

 

The police were not looking for LaShandra Charles and her cousin Marcell Taylor, but that’s who they found.

 

It was around 11pm on Sept. 26, 1988, when a man flagged down two police officers near a Fuddruckers restaurant in far West Houston. The man was looking for his wife, whom he believed to be missing. As the trio searched the area, a Fuddruckers employee approached the officers to say that while walking home to a nearby apartment complex, he’d found a body in the woods behind the restaurant.

 

The cops walked to a large, overgrown field of tall trees dissected by a network of weed-choked trails. The restaurant parking lot was well-lit, but the field was not. The night was clear, and the officers used the moonlight to find their way along the trash-littered trail toward a fence at the far end of the property. There, police found a body – but not that of the person they’d been flagged down to find.

 

Instead, police found Charles, 15, and her 3-year-old cousin, Taylor. Taylor, who was lying facedown when the police found him, was dead. Charles was sprawled facedown just off the trail, not far from her cousin. Blood pooled under her head, staining the weeds on both sides of the trail. According to Houston police reports, her shorts and underwear were pulled halfway down and the leather strap she used for a belt was discarded nearby. Both Charles and Taylor had been stabbed through the neck. Whatever the weapon, its blade was long enough to cut clear through Taylor, leaving a gash where it emerged, just below the hairline on the back of his neck.

According to officer testimony, Charles was still alive. Sgt. Don Hamilton was on patrol when he got the call that two people had been found in the field. He rushed to the scene. Charles was having a hard time breathing, and her neck wound was “bleeding rather profusely,” he testified the following spring; blood covered her face and matted her hair. Nonetheless, Hamilton said, she was able to speak. “I asked her … ‘What happened?’” testified Hamilton. “She replied, ‘He tried to rape me.’” Who did, he asked. “She stated, ‘Preston.’” She knew her assailant, Hamilton said Charles told him; as her voice grew weak, forcing him to bend down to hear her talk, she asked him to find her cousin. An ambulance finally took Charles to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

 

It took less than a day for police to find and arrest 22-year-old Preston Hughes III, secure two separate confessions from him, and find evidence in Hughes’ nearby apartment that police said matched the crime. Hughes was charged with capital murder, and seven months later was sentenced to death.

 

Although the deaths of Charles and Taylor and the subsequent conviction of Hughes might appear a simple tale of prey and predator, the truth is far more complicated, says John Allen, a Cali­fornia-based blogger better known in cyberspace as The Skeptical Juror. Allen is adamant not only that Hughes is innocent, but also that he was framed by members of the Houston police, who planted evidence in his apartment; by the police crime lab, whose scientists did scant testing of the evidence; and by a deputy medical examiner who bent over backward during Hughes’ trial to bolster the state’s theory of the crime. Allen has written more than 60 stories about the case, and he charges that Hughes has never had defense counsel do enough on his behalf. “It shouldn’t be this way,” says Allen.

If Houston police did indeed corrupt the process, it may be quite difficult to determine whether Hughes is guilty or innocent. According to the New York-based Innocence Project, government misconduct is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Equally problematic is when otherwise well-meaning police attempt, in effect, to “frame the guilty” – or those they believe to be guilty – thereby tainting legitimate evidence of guilt. In those circumstances, how can the system determine who should be punished – or in capital cases, deserve to die?

Hughes is scheduled to be executed Nov. 15.

Allen is determined to expose the corruption in Hughes’ case, and to demonstrate his innocence, of which Allen says he is certain. “It’s going to get done.”

Continue Reading @ Austin Chronicle

Todd Willingham’s family seeks posthumous pardon

Executed Texan’s Family Seeks Pardon

By ETHAN BRONNER

Associated Press

Cameron T. Willingham

 

Two decades after a Texas man was convicted of murdering his three young daughters by setting his own house on fire, and eight years after a campaign to prove his innocence failed to stop his execution, his family petitioned on Wednesday for a posthumous pardon.

The case of Cameron Todd Willingham of Corsicana, Tex., has drawn attention because it seems to offer evidence that an innocent man was executed based on flawed science. Spurred partly by this case, the Texas fire marshal recently agreed to re-examine questionable arson convictions.

The battle to clear Mr. Willingham’s name has symbolic value for those fighting to end the death penalty. Six years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court wrote that he was unaware of “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

Mr. Willingham’s conviction was based heavily on testimony by the Texas state fire marshal, who asserted that the scene offered clear signs of arson. Recent research has raised substantial questions about his conclusions and led to a review of other arson convictions in Texas. That research is scheduled to be presented to a panel of fire experts by January, and advocates say it could lead to the reversal of several wrongful convictions.

“Todd’s last words were: ‘Please clear my name. I did not kill my children,’ ” said Stephen Saloom, policy director of the Innocence Project, which has led the work on this case, with the pro bono assistance of the New York law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel. The Innocence Project is affiliated with Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University.

“All the evidence against him has been disproven,” Mr. Saloom said. “There have been nine reports issued about this case over the years. We are saying to the board: you couldn’t have known before, but now you have all this evidence before you.”

Continue Reading @ NY Times

Related articles

• Family seeks pardon review for executed Texas man (star-telegram.com)

Damon Thibodeaux is the 300th DNA Exoneree!

Via The Innocence Project:

Damon Thibodeaux, who has been on death row in Louisiana since October 1997, was exonerated of the murder and rape of his 14-year old step-cousin, Crystal Champagne, making him the 300th person to be exonerated by DNA evidence in the United States, and the 18th to have served time on death row.

 

 

Damon Thibodeaux was sentenced to death for the New Orleans-area murder of his half-cousin Crystal Champagne based largely on his recanted confession. Thibodeaux spent 15 years in prison for the crime before his exoneration through DNA testing on September 28, 2012.

The Crime

Fourteen-year-old Crystal Champagne was last seen alive on the late afternoon of July 19, 1996, when she left the family’s Westwego, Louisiana, apartment for a Winn-Dixie at the nearby strip mall. When she did not return home as expected, her family, several friends and law enforcement began a search for her that ended on the following evening with the discovery of her body along the levee in Bridge City. There was a piece of red extension cord around her neck and the right side of her head and face had been beaten. In addition, her shirt was pulled above her breasts and her shorts around her knees and ankles, suggesting a possible sexual assault.

The Confession and Trial

Thibodeaux was among the suspects brought in for questioning by police after the murder. He initially denied any involvement in the crime and agreed to take a polygraph. He was informed that he had failed the polygraph.

After additional hours of interrogation, he gave a recorded statement confessing to consensual and non-consensual sex with the victim and then to beating and murdering her. Only 54 minutes were recorded out of the entire 8 ½ hour interrogation. This confession was inconsistent with the crime in numerous details. After learning from detectives that the victim had been strangled, Thibodeaux confessed to using a white or gray speaker wire from his car. Thibodeaux was fed non-public details about the crime, but here he guessed incorrectly. He couldn’t have known about the red electrical cord, which had been burned off a section of cord found hanging from the tree above her body.

Although forensic examiners could find no evidence of semen in the victim’s body, a detective theorized that a sexual assault still could have occurred and that post-mortem maggot activity had consumed and degraded the evidence.

Additionally, two eyewitnesses testified that they saw someone pacing near where the body was found. They both selected Thibodeaux from a photo array and identified him in court.

Post-Conviction

In 2007, based on evidence of Thibodeaux’s innocence, the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office initiated a joint reinvestigation with the Innocence Project and the rest of Thibodeaux’s legal team. The parties conducted multiple rounds of DNA and forensic evidence testing of the crime scene and other physical evidence and interviewed numerous fact witnesses.

The eyewitnesses who identified Thibodeaux as the man they had seen pacing near the crime scene had already seen Thibodeaux’s photo in the news media before taking part in the identification procedure. Moreover, they revealed that the sighting had occurred the day after the body was found, when Thibodeaux was already in custody.

DNA testing performed by Dr. Edward Blake and other forensic experts concluded that there was no evidence connecting Thibodeaux to the murder and that, contrary to Thibodeaux’s statement, the victim had not been sexually assaulted. DNA testing of the maggots revealed no evidence of semen. DNA testing on both Thibodeaux and Champagne’s clothing confirmed that he could not have been the perpetrator. DNA on the cord in the tree, which had tested positive for blood in the original investigation, revealed male DNA that did not belong to Thibodeaux.

The reinvestigation further confirmed that Thibodeaux’s confession was false in every significant aspect and included a thorough examination of the reasons why Thibodeaux had falsely confessed, including exhaustion, psychological vulnerability and fear of the death penalty. The prosecution’s own expert had concluded that Thibodeaux falsely confessed based on fear of the death penalty, but this information was never shared with the defense.

District Attorney, Paul Connick, Jr., joined the Innocence Project, the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana and the law firm of Fredrikson & Byron in agreeing to overturn Thibodeaux’s conviction and death sentence, and he was released in September 2012 after 15 years on death row and 16 years of wrongful incarceration as the 300th person exonerated through DNA testing.

 

Related articles

• ‘The minute you give up completely is the minute you die’ (wwltv.com)
• Damon Thibodeaux, Being on Death Row Since October 1997: Innocent & Now Free! (incaseofinnocence.wordpress.com)

Preston Hughes’ Impending Wrongful Execution

I came across this case via an article on the Huffington Post – and while I was a bit familiar with “The Skeptical Juror”, I am now a die hard fan and am following his blog.

David Protess wrote the article in the HuffPo that discusses the work of The Skeptical Juror, aka J. Bennett Allen. Truth be told I am a fan of David Protess and his blog too. David is the President of the Chicago Innocence Project and his HuffPo blog has always been right on target for those of us who focus on criminal justice.  Mr. Allen’s amazing work deserves to be highlighted-he is 64-year-old former aerospace engineer from Southern California with no formal legal training. And his blog is definitely ‘MUST READ’ material. In this particular article the case of Preston Hughes is highlighted.  The evidence of innocence that  Mr. Allen has uncovered is astounding.  We must take notice and stand united -because Texas is set to execute Preston Hughes in 87 days, evidence & innocence be damned.

The Skeptical Juror and the Texas Condemned Man

He is an unlikely watchdog over the criminal justice system, a 64-year-old former aerospace engineer from Southern California with no formal legal training. Yet his blog, The Skeptical Juror, has rapidly become must-reading for journalists, lawyers and lay persons interested in wrongful conviction cases that otherwise might escape attention.

Meet the man behind the blog, J. Bennett Allen, who stopped an injustice in its tracks as a juror in a 2007 child molestation trial. Allen, the foreperson, came to believe the defendant was innocent. The 11 other jurors thought otherwise. Using his training as an engineer, Allen skeptically questioned each piece of evidence until — in a scene that reprised Henry Fonda’s 12 Angry Men — he converted all but two of the jurors. The judge declared a mistrial, the defendant was eventually freed and Allen morphed from a skeptical juror to The Skeptical Juror.

“It was eye-opening to see how easily an innocent man could have been convicted,” Allen recently told me. The experience compelled him to begin scrutinizing court records in other cases, and his blog was born. Altogether, Allen has deconstructed the evidence in 97 criminal cases and written four books about wrongful convictions, including The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Cameron Todd Willingham — about a Texas man who was executed for a crime he likely did not commit.

Now he is faced with his “most daunting” case, one that involves another Texas death row prisoner. And he worries that his scientific assessment of the condemned man’s innocence will fall on deaf ears.

Continue Reading @ HuffPo

and read up on more of this case and others at  The Skepitcal Juror’s Blog

Preston Hughes’ Impending Wrongful Execution (87 Days)
Case Summary
The Big Sleep
Down the Rabbit Hole
Huffington Post

 

 

How Many Innocent People Are in Prison?

The exact number is unknown—but is likely in the tens of thousands. Plus: video of Rick Perry pardoning a dead man, and a map of exonerations nationwide.

 

By Beth Schwartzapfel and Hannah Levintova

Before we talk about how many people may be behind bars for crimes they did not commit, we must acknowledge that it’s nearly impossible to know—only broad estimates are possible. There are several key reasons, experts say, why a number is so hard to ascertain. Because the sprawling criminal justice system is a patchwork of federal, state, county, and municipal courts, prisons, and jails—each with its own system (or lack thereof) of record-keeping and data-reporting—we don’t even know how many people are convicted, let alone wrongfully convicted, of crimes in the United States. “We don’t even have a denominator,” says University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett. “But the wrongful convictions we do know about suggest that there’s a big problem.”

Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted.

In fact, since the late 1980s there have been as many as 850 exonerations nationwide, according to University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, a leading researcher in the field. Many of them float under the radar, Gross says, unlike the highly publicized DNA exonerations.

The following map shows the 825 known exonerations in the United States since 1989, using data gathered by Mother Jones with assistance from the ‪Center on Wrongful Convictions, The Innocence Project,‬ and Samuel Gross. Click on each state for further details, including whether it has a compensation law for people who are wrongfully imprisoned:

Continue Reading @ Mother Jones

When innocence is pink

Wrongly convicted women fight for recognition, support, remedies

Julie Baumer was exonerated last year in Macomb County.

By Sandra Svoboda

Published: January 12, 2011

From a deep sleep, Julie Rea Harper awoke to screams.

They were coming from her 10-year-old son in his bed in the next room as he was being fatally stabbed with a knife from her kitchen. Rushing to her child, Harper surprised the intruder, who dragged her into the backyard, struck her in the face and fled.

Harper called police in her downstate Illinois town. In retrospect, she thought they’d hunt down her child’s killer while his trail was fresh.

Instead, they suspected her.

That was despite the fact that her son’s room was covered in his blood, but Harper’s clothes weren’t splattered. And when police searched her plumbing system for signs of her cleanup, they found none. But they found her story of a random intruder incredible and continued to focus on her, perhaps finding it easier or safer to build a case against what they decided was a crazy, irrational woman instead of a random stranger who could have struck at anyone in the small town.

Harper, who now lives in suburban Detroit, was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to 65 years in prison for her son’s 1997 murder. In the following years, dozens of attorneys, investigators and advocates worked to challenge her conviction. They got a big break when a child serial killer on death row in Texas confessed to the attack and an appellate court vacated her conviction. In 2006, Harper was retried but found not guilty. She had already served roughly two years.

“It’s very painful to keep remembering what it was like in there,” Harper says, “and that at any moment you could be pulled back into it.”

Just weeks ago, she received a certificate of innocence from the Illinois courts, an official declaration that she was not responsible for the death of her son.

While much attention has been given to the hundreds of men who have been exonerated of rapes and murders by DNA evidence during the last decade, Harper is among the handful of wrongly convicted women who have had their cases re-examined and their guilty verdicts changed without the relative

luxury of such science and forensic proof.

Their charges have — more often than men’s — stemmed from allegations of child abuse or sexual conduct involving children, studies have shown. Compared to men, they also have been more often accused of violence against family members, as in Harper’s case.

With those charges comes a particular burden: the obvious grief over the loss of or the harm to a loved one, compounded by the horror of being accused, convicted and imprisoned for that very crime.

“The main difference with women from men in wrongful conviction cases is women are generally accused of harming someone they’re close to,” says Laura Caldwell, an attorney and director of the Life After Innocence Project at Loyola University’s School of Law in Chicago. “There’s a double-whammy.”

And, as with male prisoners, women convicted of abusing children are ostracized or harassed in prison. “This is traumatic stuff,” Caldwell says.

‘Terrible, uphill climb’

To have any hope of exoneration, the wrongfully convicted need to begin with compelling new evidence and a sympathetic legal team. Then they need to draw a willing judge or appellate panel; that’s a lucky break in a criminal justice system that’s designed to uphold earlier actions instead of investigating them and correcting mistakes. Or maybe they can find a courageous governor who’ll believe their claim of innocence and be willing to publicly acknowledge it in a pardon.

“It’s a terrible, uphill climb. There’s a lot of skepticism both among the public and judges,” says Carl Marlinga, former Macomb County Prosecutor. “If you don’t have the 100 percent answer [with DNA], a 99 percent answer is maybe not enough for some judges and the general public.”

In 2009, Marlinga, now in private practice, won a new trial for a Mount Clemens woman, Julie Baumer, who was convicted of first-degree child abuse in 2005 involving her newborn nephew. A jury last year found her not guilty after students and attorneys from the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic proved the infant’s injuries were the result of a stroke instead of Baumer’s alleged abuse.

“Overturning a wrongful conviction for a woman is probably one of the hardest tasks there is,” Marlinga says.

No national organization or formal support network has existed to advocate specifically for innocent women still imprisoned or to support exonerated women in restarting their lives once they are released.

But last year, a handful of these women who had been frustrated by the overwhelming preponderance of men at a national innocence conference organized a meeting in suburban Detroit to focus on women and their experiences and needs. Harper, living here, was the connection, and she did the lioness’ share of the preparations, attendees say.

About 60 attorneys, counselors, parents of wrongly accused women, exonerees — men and women — and other advocates got together for both formal presentations and informal meetings at the November conference.

They talked. They cried. They shared. They figured out they weren’t alone.

And they were energized to do more to promote public awareness of the causes of wrongful convictions of women, to find legal support for innocent women in prison and to support women who are trying to put their lives back together after imprisonment.

“For women exonerees, by women exonerees? I think that’s the best kind of support,” says Karen Wolff, a social worker with the national Innocence Project who attended the conference. “They are the only ones who’ve experienced it, the only ones who can talk about and feel what it’s like to be innocent and incarcerated and to come out and create a new life after having been away for so long. There’s a different kind of help they offer than we [can] as social workers or anybody else.”

Calling themselves “Women and Innocence,” the new group is the first of its kind.

“This was something that had been on my mind for a long time,” says Joyce Ann Brown, falsely accused and convicted in Texas of a double murder. Released 21 years ago after serving nine years, she runs a nonprofit organization that helps men and women, guilty or innocent of the crimes for which they served time, readjust to society. “I just truly know that this is going to be an organization that will be able to assist innocent women in prison.”

Continue Reading….