Over the years, Prison Legal News and its parent non-profit organization, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), have filed dozens of censorship lawsuits against state prison systems and county jails, as well as numerous public records suits. [See: PLN, May 2015, p.12]. More recently, HRDC has represented the families of deceased prisoners in wrongful death complaints against corrections officials, and also represented a former prisoner who was pregnant and lost her baby due to inadequate medical care at a CCA-run jail. [See: PLN, Dec. 2014, p.28].

HRDC has now begun taking wrongful conviction cases, partnering with the Chicago law firm Loevy & Loevy to represent former Illinois state prisoner Jermaine Walker.

Walker, 39, a student at Fisk University in Tennessee prior to his wrongful imprisonment, filed a federal civil rights action on July 7, 2016 that accused current and former Chicago police officers of beating and planting drugs on him during a February 2006 traffic stop. Walker, a PLN subscriber while incarcerated, filed for a Certificate of Innocence after Cook County Judge Catherine Haberkorn ordered his immediate release from prison in March 2016. He had served ten years.

The Certificate of Innocence was granted on April 27, 2016. ...

In 2007, prisoner Aaron Willey filed a pro se federal civil rights lawsuit against guards employed by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, alleging harassment, inadequate nutrition, theft of legal documents, malicious prosecution, false imprisonment and unsanitary conditions of confinement.

Willey claimed that after he refused ...

The District of Columbia paid $950,000 to settle the lawsuit of Joseph S. Heard for unlawful imprisonment.

On November 15, 1998, Heard, a deaf man, was arrested for unlawful entry into a George Washington University building. The case was dismissed October 13, 1999 with an order from the court for ...

A $1.5 million settlement was reached in a lawsuit brought by a Michigan man who spent 13 years in prison for a rape charge based on faulty bite mark evidence.

Two weeks before the case was set to proceed to trial, Michael Cristini reached a deal with The City of ...

An interesting collaboration between medical and law professionals, under the leadership of University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel R. Gross, led to the application of medical statistical analysis to exonerations of death-sentenced prisoners, in order to estimate the number of innocent defendants who receive the death penalty. The report, published in April 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal, estimated the rate of wrongful capital convictions at 4.1%, or 1 in 25. The 95% confidence level of the study was 2.8 to 5.2%. This was the first report to use “solid and appropriate statistical methods” to estimate the error rate in capital convictions.

Death penalty cases were studied because they are unique among criminal prosecutions, in that they receive more serious scrutiny at every step of the process from initial crime scene investigation to execution. Death-sentenced prisoners usually have the assistance of attorneys until the execution is carried out. Presumably, jurors take their task more seriously in capital cases, and judges apply greater scrutiny when a person’s life is at stake.

This additional scrutiny means the rate of exonerations of death-sentenced prisoners may be close to the actual rate of ...

Kickstarter and other crowdfunding websites provide an interesting option for prisoners with imagination and originality to explore career-expanding opportunities, raise money and gain access to a commodity often in short supply behind bars – hope.

Basically, crowdfunding involves developing online campaigns for specific projects, charitable causes or services, or to develop certain products. People who want to support a campaign can donate funds, from as little as $1 to as much as they want. Hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of people may join together to support and fund a campaign, and once the project achieves its target funding amount the money is paid to the campaign organizer so they can make the project a reality.

Kickstarter, founded in 2009, is a popular crowdfunding site that specializes in entrepreneurial campaigns with an artistic focus, while other sites like GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, Fundly and RocketHub are more flexible. Some sites allow campaigns for legal defense expenses, bail money and prison ministries. Almost all of these services charge fees ranging from around 4 to 9 percent of the money collected during the campaign; some are all-or-nothing, meaning the entire amount of the project must be funded or the campaign is cancelled. Donors ...

The word “first” was applied to Craig M. Watkins multiple times after his election to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in 2006. He was the county’s first black D.A., the first D.A. who had been a public defender before being elected prosecutor and the first D.A. to establish a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in Dallas.

The CIU turned the culture at the prosecutors’ office on its head. Previously, convictions were to be had at all costs and defended to the end. Henry Wade, one of Watkins’ predecessors, was famously quoted as having said that it was easy to convict a guilty man; it was the innocent ones who were a bit more difficult. That reflected a culture where the only thing that mattered was winning a conviction, not the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

The culture changed when Watkins set up the CIU. Due to the “save it all” policy at the Southwest Institute for Forensic Sciences, Dallas County was sitting on a mound of forensic evidence from past cases. So the CIU began an internal audit of the over 400 cases in which a prisoner had requested DNA testing.

“There was an unspoken desire for us to ...

By James Kilgore, Truthout

How many US prisoners are wrongfully convicted? And how many are technically "guilty" but still should not be locked up?

This original story saw the light of day thanks to support from readers like you. Help us publish more stories like it by donating to Truthout now!

After more than three decades of sleepwalking, mainstream America is waking up to the fact that the dragnet of mass incarceration has captured lots of innocent people. In the past few months, media productions framed around this notion of innocence have gone viral. Millions of "Making a Murderer" viewers are following the case of Stephen Avery, a middle-aged white man, as he appeals a questionable murder conviction. Avery previously spent 18 years in prison for a crime he definitely did not commit. An online petition requesting President Obama to exonerate Avery and free him immediately has drawn more than half a million signatures.

On the audio front, "Serial" has shocked the podcasting world by receiving over 80 million downloads. The 12-part series focuses on the murder of 18-year-old Hae Min Lee in 1999 in Baltimore. The courts convicted her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, of the crime and sentenced him to ...

by David Reutter and Joe Watson

Former Louisiana death row prisoner John Thompson has spearheaded an organization that aims to help the wrongfully convicted and former prisoners successfully rebuild their lives.

Thompson was sentenced to death for the 1984 fatal shooting of a hotel executive from a prominent New Orleans family. His conviction was reversed because the prosecution withheld evidence that cast doubt on his guilt, and he was acquitted at another jury trial in 2003.

“We felt good about the retrial; the evidence suggested we were going to win. We were worried about what happens next, after he walks out of prison after 18 years,” said Michael Banks, one of Thompson’s appellate attorneys. “There’s not a lot of vocational training on death row; the only thing you’re trained for is to learn to die.”

Thompson was married and had a steady job just six months after his release. By 2005 he had a new home, a car and a dog, and he and his wife were running their own sandwich shop. Then Hurricane Katrina wiped it out. That made Thompson realize he was not the only one struggling to ease back into society.

“Men come home and the system ...

Delbert Tibbs, a peaceful advocate to abolish the death penalty, has lost his battle against cancer and died at the age of 74. His advocacy was borne of personal experience of being wrongfully convicted.

Tibbs was born on June 19, 1939, in Shelby, Mississippi. At the age of 12, he moved to Chicago with his family. As a young husband and father, he worked for a company that printed magazines and catalogs. Tibbs described the atmosphere there as “one of the most racist places that ever existed.” He later obtained a job as a claims adjusted for a cab company.

In 1970, Tibbs life took a turn. Following a divorce, he entered the Chicago Theological Seminary. He dropped out because “there was an agitation within my spirit.” That restlessness led Tibbs to travel cross-country.

He was stopped by police near Ocala, Florida, in early 1974. They questioned him about a rape and murdered that occurred in Fort Myers, which was 220 miles to the south. The officers took Polaroid pictures of him, but they released him because he did not match the victim’s description.

A highway patrolman stopped Tibbs a month later in Lee County Mississippi. He was arrested for ...