LIST 15

13 Innocent People Who Went to Prison

At press time, the Innocence Project had secured the release of 141 people who were rotting in prison for crimes they didn't commit. Using DNA testing, the nonprofit group proves that the wrongfully convicted are not the ones who committed the crimes in question.

1

Steven Avery

Avery was sent up in 1986 on convictions for first-degree sexual assault, attempted murder, and false imprisonment. After serving eighteen years in hell, DNA uncovered the real perp.

2

Terry Chalmers

Chalmers is one of many poor saps who went to prison based solely on identification by the victim. The woman who was raped was unable to pick Chalmers out of a photo lineup the first time around. A month and a half later, she was shown another group of six photos. Chalmers was the only one whose picture was in both line-ups, and the victim chose him. In court, she reaffirmed that he was the one who raped and robbed her. Chalmers was sentenced to twelve to 24 years for rape, sodomy, robbery, and two counts of grand larceny. DNA tests performed in summer 1994 showed that he didn't do it, and he was released after spending seven and a half years in prison.

3

Lonnie Erby

In 1985, a series of rapes and attempted rapes of teenage girls in St. Louis had the city on edge. Police picked up Erby in the vicinity where a peeping tom had been reported, and prosecutors considered him a suspect in the attacks. All of the victims fingered him as their assailant. Even though he had alibi witnesses for the times of the attacks, he was sentenced to 115 years on multiple counts: kidnapping, armed criminal action, forcible rape, forcible sodomy, and stealing. The Innocence Project started working on his case in 1995 but wasn't able to force DNA testing until eight years later. The results showed that Erby could not possibly have committed any of the crimes.

4

Richard Johnson

Johnson was charged with raping and robbing a woman who later picked him out of a photo line-up and a live line-up. No other evidence was presented, and, unbelievably, his own attorney failed to submit evidence that would've immediately cleared Johnson (tests showed the victim had been raped by someone who secretes H antigens; Johnson does not secrete them). After four years in the clink, he was given his life back in 1996, thanks to DNA testing and the Innocence Project.

5

Larry Maze

In 2001, Maze became the one-hundredth innocent person to be released from prison based on DNA tests. A rape victim hadn't picked him out of two live line-ups but fingered him in a photo line-up. Based completely on this less-than-reassuring identification, Maze was given 80 years in the slammer. After the Innocence Project got involved, authorities said that the rape kit had been lost. When pressed, they finally located it, and it showed that Maze was not the rapist. He had served 21 years. The Project reports: “Shockingly, after the new prosecutors on the case contacted the victim, she revealed that the police had hypnotized her prior to her identification of Mayes from the photographic lineup.”

6

Calvin Lee Scott

Scott was convicted of a rape that occurred in 1982. He started serving his sentence the next year, and it wasn't until 20 years later the real rapist was uncovered and Scott was freed.

7

Earl Washington

Police thought Washington had raped and killed a young mother in Culpeper, Virginia. When they picked him up for an alleged assault, Washington—whose IQ is in the neighborhood of 69—rapidly agreed with police that he was responsible for five different crimes, including the sexual assault/murder. The courts threw out four of those confessions when it became obvious that Washington had just told the cops what they wanted to hear. Yet the district attorney apparently was convinced that the fifth confession was genuine, even though Washington didn't know any of the details (for example, he said he knifed the victim two or three times when she had actually been stabbed 38 times). This obviously bogus confession was literally the only evidence against Washington, but it was enough to get him sentenced to death. After seventeen years, he was sprung when DNA showed the perp was someone else.

8

Bernard Webster

Three eyewitnesses (including the victim) and misleading scientific testimony were enough to get Webster sentenced to 30 years for rape and housebreaking. He went in as a 20-year-old and came out as a 40-year-old after DNA testing showed he could not have been the one who committed the 1982 crime.

9 10 11 12 13

The Central Park Five

In a crime that became seared into our collective psyche, Trisha Meili was viciously raped and beaten almost to death while jogging in Central Park on April 19, 1989. Through intense, marathon interrogations, police obtained conflicting confessions from five teenagers: Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise. After they had served eight years, Matias Reyes—already in prison for rape and murder—said that he had committed the crime. DNA from hair and semen on the victim were tested and matched to Wise. A hair found on one of the boys, which had “matched and resembled” the victim's hair, was shown through mitochondrial DNA testing not to be hers. The five young men were freed in December 2002.

Law Quote # 1

“Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
–Henry David Thoreau