by TChris

When the police publicly identify someone as a suspect in a notorious crime, the injury done to that person’s reputation may be irreparable. Just ask Richard Jewel.

James Van de Velde is doing his best to restore his reputation after the New Haven Police Department identified him as one of 5 to 10 suspects in the stabbing murder of one of his students at Yale in 1998. No other suspect was named. He passed a lie detector test in 2000 and in 2001 the state’s attorney for New Haven announced that DNA from skin found under the victim’s fingernails did not match that of Van de Velde. Still, the police have not made a public statement that Van de Velde is no longer a suspect.

Van de Velde has turned to the courts for help in his quest to restore his reputation. He recently settled a libel suit against Quinnipiac University arising out of its false claim that he had been fired from two television internships, and has a lawsuit pending against The Hartford Courant. Also pending is a lawsuit seeking damages from the New Haven Police Chief, four detectives, and Yale University officials for causing him to be publicly branded as a suspect in the murder.

But Mr. Van de Velde wants something money cannot buy: his good name. His lawyer said Tuesday that although the lawsuits can "hold people accountable for what they've done to Jim, he isn't sure the Police Department will ever recant its statement implicating him."

"I hope someday the New Haven Police Department will have the integrity to admit it wronged James Van de Velde," he said. "I have real doubts whether that is going to happen."

Restoring a reputation after the police recklessly identify someone as a murder suspect is as difficult as putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Whatever redress he wins in court will be well deserved, but the damage will probably never be undone.

Bump and Update: Latest news on the case is here and here. It's even news in Australia [via How Appealing].

Peter Goldberger, the ever modest defense attorney, writes in to say:

At least equal credit for this success should go to the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Court Division, Defender Association of Philadelphia, my fabulous co-counsel, led by Michael Wiseman and including Christina Swarns, who recently left Philadelphia for NYC to head the criminal justice programs of the NAACP Legal Defense and Eduction Fund (once headed by Thurgood Marshall).

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Original Post 1/17 12:06 am:

At about 12:30 pm Friday, 1/16/04, Nicholas Yarris, age 42, walked out of the State Correctional Institution at Greene County, PA, to the arms of his parents, after 22 years on Pennsylvania's death row. DNA testing in the spring of 2003 confirmed that he was wrongly convicted. Pa murder and rape charges were dropped in September. In December the local DA's office conceded that there was insufficient evidence to support a retrial.

This week, the Orange County, Florida DA's office conceded that the 30 year sentence for robbery he picked up while briefly on escape status in 1985 should be reduced to 7 years, long since served. A Florida judge order the Florida sentence reduced yesterday and agreed that he need not be extradited from Pennsylvania to Florida to effectuate that reduction. After some last minute paperwork frustration due to slow-moving bureaucracy in the Florida Dept of Corrections, he went free at midday Friday.

Once again, kudos to Peter Goldberger of Ardmore, PA, who represented the indigent Mr. Yarris for the past ten years. For more on the case, see our coverage here.

Update: Was it a lynching or justice?

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original post

Marcus Dixon is a black high school honor student serving a ten year sentence in a Georgia prison for consensual sex with his nearly-16-year-old white girlfriend.

Although a jury acquitted Marcus of rape and three other counts of violent acts, the prosecutor also charged him with "aggravated child molestation." Consensual sex with a virgin fits into the technical reading of this Georgia statute. The statute has never been applied to consensual sex between two teenagers with less than three years age difference, until now.

Supporters of Marcus Dixon are invited to join Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Emeritus Dr. Joseph Lowery, Rep. Tyrone Brooks, Sen. Vincent Fort and people from throughout the state and the country who will attend a special church service and candlelight vigil to the steps of the Georgia Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2004 at 6 p.m. The event will be held at Central Presbyterian Church, located at 201 Washington Street across from the Georgia capitol (Atlanta).

The service will also include an opportunity for people to donate to the Dixon relief fund aimed at funding Marcus’s college tuition whenever he gets out of prison, providing for him after college, and reducing the debt his family has encumbered. For those who can not attend the event but would like to send a donation, please make checks payable to “Marcus Dixon Trust” and mail to: Marcus Dixon Trust, P.O. Box 102812, Atlanta GA 30368-2812.

For media coverage of Marcus's case, check out:

Fox World News is airing a piece "The Big Story" at 9:30 EST Saturday 17th;
CBS Evening News two part segment Monday 19th and Tuesday 20th;ABC Nightline on Wednesday 21st

Marcus' appeal is pending in the Georgia Supreme Court. It will likely be heard on January 21, 2004 with a decision rendered some months later. Lis at Riba Rambles adds her thoughts, having seen a post by Skippy at American Street.

Please sign the petition opposing the wrongful conviction and sentencing of Marcus Dixon.

[comments now closed]

Former death row prisoner Nick Yarris will be released from prison within days. He is the first Pennyslvania inmate to be cleared by DNA evidence. He spent over half of his 42 years awaiting execution.

Congratulations are due to Peter Goldberger of Ardmore, PA who represented Yarris for the past ten years. Peter is a regular reader of TalkLeft.

[Ed. Mr. Yarris' name is Nick Yarris, not James Yarris as we originally posted. We've corrected it, thanks to Mr. Goldberger's comment.]

Columnist Steve Chapman makes an excellent argument for the admission of expert testimony on false confessions. We think it's only a matter of time. We've successfully argued for the admission of expert testimony critiquing handwriting examiners and for psychological experts on memory to explain the fallacies of eyewitness evidence. The same arguments can be made for false confessions. As Chapman points out:

The record of wrongful convictions, however, indicates juries acting on their own instincts can be completely fooled. They often put too much weight on a defendant's self-incrimination and not enough on the pressures that led to it. That's why there are so many people sent to prison after confessing to things they didn't do. Hearing from an expert can overcome that tendency.

As a federal appeals court said in a 1996 decision overturning a conviction because the trial court rejected such testimony, "Even though the jury may have had beliefs about the subject, the question is whether those beliefs were correct. Properly conducted social science research often shows that commonly held beliefs are in error." Expert testimony "would have let the jury know that a phenomenon known as false confessions exists, how to recognize it, and how to decide whether it fit the facts of the case being tried."

Juries are regularly allowed to hear confessions from defendants and urged to believe them. Why shouldn't they be allowed to learn about the grounds for doubt? Anything that reduces the frequency of wrongful convictions ought to be embraced by prosecutors and police. False confessions aren't good for them or anyone else — except the guilty.

We finally found our Christmas story. Darryl Hunt was released from prison today after serving 18 years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit. Hunt is 38 years old.

Through two trials and several hearings over nearly two decades, his supporters had accused police and prosecutors of railroading Hunt with questionable witnesses despite the lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime. Then, last week, investigators looking into the case came up with a new DNA match - tying the crime to another man, Willard E. Brown, 43.

Police suspected Brown in the Sykes case early on after he was identified by the victim in another downtown rape. But investigators ruled him out because they believed he was in prison the day Sykes was killed as she walked to work at the now-closed Winston-Salem Sentinel. Investigators learned last week, after a database search of DNA samples turned up Brown's name, that he had been released on parole two months before Sykes died.

....Hunt was first convicted in Sykes death in 1985, but he won a new trial after a city manager's report blasted the police department for shoddy work in the investigation and the State Bureau of Investigation began its own investigation. At the second trial, in 1990, he was convicted again.

Even though DNA testing four years later excluded Hunt as the source of the semen collected from the crime scene, a judge denied Hunt's motion for a third trial, saying the DNA results didn't necessarily clear him of involvement. Hunt continued to fight the conviction, and earlier this year, at the request of his attorneys, a new round of DNA testing was ordered to compare the Sykes sample against state and federal databases of DNA profiles taken from convicted felons. That testing turned up the match with Brown.

Brown, already jailed for a probation violation, is now is now charged with murder, rape, kidnapping and armed robbery. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

Mr. Hunt, in a telephone call from jail on Tuesday, had this to say:

"Basically I was trying not to get overexcited because we had been close before and let down," Hunt said. "Everyone was basically wishing me luck, telling me this was finally it. They were praying for me, the guards and the inmates."

Alberto Ramos was wrongfully convicted of rape. He served seven years in jail, and was released eleven years ago. Today it will be announced that New York will pay him $5 million the largest such award in New York's history. The cause of the wrongful conviction was prosecutorial misconduct - the withholding of documents by the district attorney:

City child abuse investigators said that they had referred the Ramos case to the Bronx district attorney's office for prosecution even though they believed that Mr. Ramos was innocent and that the child's story was false.

Day care center officials said the child had a history of sexual behavior in the classroom. They testified that they not only told the trial prosecutor about evidence favoring Mr. Ramos but had also informed other prosecutors before Mr. Ramos was arrested. No prosecutor disclosed the information to the defense.

The settlement ends 18 years of litigation.

Alberto Ramos, 40, said that while in prison he endured beatings, was sodomized and tried to commit suicide several times. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when a judge found that the prosecutor had withheld evidence that could have resulted in an acquittal.

Mr. Ramos was one of five men convicted of sexually abusing children at three city-run day care centers in the Bronx during the mid-1980's. All of the convictions have since been reversed.

Aaron Patterson, a wrongfully convicted inmate released from death row and pardoned by former Illinois Governor George Ryan is running for Congress.

Patterson was one of four men pardoned in January as part of then-Gov. George Ryan's historic clearing of death row in his final days in office. Patterson, who was convicted of killing an elderly Chicago couple in 1986, spent 17 years on death row, despite his claims police tortured him into confessing to the crime.

"I feel like the very laws that put me on death row, I want to go down there and change them," Patterson said in a telephone interview. He received a $161,500 settlement from the state for his faulty conviction and has filed a $30 million federal lawsuit against police officers and others involved in his case.

Patterson's congressional platform includes,:

...abolishing the death penalty, cracking down on police misconduct and investigating the cases of other inmates who claim they were wrongfully convicted.

We recently wrote about Mr. Patterson here, following a long profile, Live from Death Row, that appeared last month in the Chicago Tribune.

Update: Patterson's candidacy has been cleared by the Ill. State Board of Elections.

This just in via email from the National Coaliton to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP):

A Pennsylvania man today became the 112th person to be freed from death row because of factual innocence after prosecutors announced they are dropping charges against him.

Nicholas James Yarris, 41, has spent 21 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. He is Pennsylvania's fifth exoneree and the 10th of this year. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the ten people who have been freed from death row due to actual innocence in 2003 ties a record set in 1987, when ten people also were exonerated.

"The death penalty in America is not merely flawed; it is broken and beyond repair," said Brian Roberts, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "For every eight people that have been executed in this country during the past three decades, one person has been found to be actually innocent. The 112 people found to be innocent were not released due to what some might call a legal technicality - flawed jury instruction, for example - but because they actually did not do the crime."

In other death penalty news, on his last day in office, Kentucky Governor Paul Patton commuted the death penalty sentence of Kevin Stanford who was 17 at the time of his crime.

Update: Nicholas Yarris' attorney and frequent TalkLeft commenter Peter Goldberger, has represented Mr. Yarris in his bid for freedom for the past ten years. He sends in this link, and adds, "Neither the DA nor the judge offered even a kind word, much less an apology to Nick."

Three of the defendants cleared in the Central Park Jogger case will file suit Monday seeking $50 million in damages.

In addition to New York City, the men will sue the New York Police Department, current and former police officers and the Manhattan district attorney's office.

Jonathan Moore, who is representing the three men, said the charges will be "malicious prosecution" and "conspiracy to cover up the truth."

If you're going to be in New York November 20, we recommend this benefit for a new documentary on five people reentering society after spending years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

After Innocence: Lives of the Exonerated Benefit Event
Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 07:30 PM (EST)
at Studio7 in New York, NY

Please Join Us for an Event to Benefit the Making of a Non-Profit Documentary Film
Imprisoned for Decades, Proven Innocent by DNA

Contributions are tax-deductible and go directly to the production of After Innocence.

Tickets and details available here.

The Chicago Tribune continues its excellent series on wrongful convictions. Today's article features Aaron Patterson, age 39, one of 17 wrongfully convicted inmates freed from Death Row in Illinois. He is not in a forgiving frame of mind.

Since his release from Death Row 10 months ago, his goals have been at once simple and far-fetched, concrete and quixotic. He is going to run for political office someday and "shake the system up from the inside." He is going to save those he left behind the walls, and bail out others who need his help.

He is going to close crack houses and use his influence among gang members to turn street corner drug dealers into productive citizens. He is going to give them jobs cutting grass and shoveling snow. He is going to bend his old world to his new vision.

His first months of freedom have been a mighty struggle, as rage and reason battle it out for his soul. The same qualities that kept him alive on the streets and in prison--his refusal to back down, his reflexive resistance to authority--now get in the way as he tries to write a new chapter in his life.

Months after his release from prison, someone asks him how he had survived. "Anger. Anger. Anger," he replies.

Photos are here. Here is a chart of the 17 wrongfully convicted inmates in Illinois.