Shane Holloway was arrested without a warrant in 2009 and confined to the Delaware County Jail, where he was denied his pre-detention medication, and was prescribed non-narcotic pain medication by prison medical staff instead. Holloway was released from jail after nine days, and was admitted to a hospital, where he resumed his regimen of narcotic medication, including Oxycontin, for relief of chronic pain.

In August of 2010, Holloway filed his 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 action against the jail physician and his attending nurses, alleging that they had “violated his constitutional rights by acting with deliberate indifference as to his serious medical condition,” and against the Delaware County Sheriff, “by detaining him without charges for nine days...”according to the opinion.

The 7th Circuit first reviewed the claims against the Sheriff. The district court had held that Holloway did not suffer a constitutional deprivation “because he has a probable cause determination within twenty-four hours of his arrest, he had an initial hearing via video conference within three days of his arrest, and the Sheriff released him within seventy-two hours of his initial hearing,” when the prosecutor failed to file charges.
The plaintiff was not able to put forth evidence to establish that ...

by Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, and Sergio Hernandez, Special to ProPublica

The murder case against Tony Bennett seemed pretty straightforward.

Shortly before midnight on May 7, 1994, police found a 26-year-old man in the foyer of an apartment building near Flushing, Queens. Jake Powell was near death, blood pouring from a gunshot wound, but he managed to speak the name of the man who had shot him: "Tony Bennett."

Bennett, a two-time felon, was eventually captured, convicted of murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

But Bennett never served anywhere near that sentence. He has, in fact, been free since 2008 because Claude Stuart, the former Queens assistant district attorney who handled his case, violated a basic rule of law by withholding critical evidence from Bennett's attorney. A state appeals court overturned Bennett's conviction and released him after 13 years in prison.

That early release has freed Bennett to describe his role in a crime he had insisted for two decades he did not commit.

"He was wrapped up in a shower curtain in the corner of the bathroom, shivering and shaking," Bennett recalled of Powell, who Bennett said had terrorized his family for years. "He was saying ...

ProPublica

Among the thousands of prosecutors who have tried cases in the name of the people of New York City, Claude Stuart came to hold a handful of unfortunate distinctions:

• He was a serial abuser of his authority. State appellate courts reversed three convictions based on his wrongdoing.

• His misconduct actually led to disciplinary action by his superiors. He lost his job, and eventually his law license, after an appellate court determined he had lied to a judge about the whereabouts of a key witness.

• The particulars of his disciplinary proceedings became public, opening a window into the typically secretive panels that are supposed to police the state’s lawyers.

Stuart declined repeated requests for comment for this story.

It’s worth it, then, to appreciate the impact of Stuart’s career in greater detail, how the misconduct took place, how it has complicated the continuing pursuit of justice, and how the consequences of Stuart’s misconduct still linger, years after the man himself was exposed and disgraced.

The People v. Tyronne Johnson, Stuart’s last trial as a prosecutor in Queens, is a perfect case to trace those issues.


The Crime:

On Feb. 24, 2000, Queens prosecutors charged 23-year-old Tyronne Johnson ...

An increasing number of American citizens have been questioned, detained and even deported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as a result of databases that incorrectly identify them as undocumented immigrants.

According to the New York Times, “Detentions of citizens are part of the widening impact on Americans, as well as on immigrants, of President Obama’s enforcement strategies, which have led to more than 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of his term, the highest numbers in six decades.” In fiscal year (FY) 2012, 409,849 immigrants were deported – a record number.

With growing criticism of law enforcement sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods and job sites that result in complaints about racial profiling, as well as widespread condemnation of immigration detention facilities, the issue of U.S. citizens being caught up in immigration raids has become more pronounced. Across the country, according to the Times, “citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.”

The issue becomes even thornier when alleged fingerprint “matches” of people booked into local jails result in ...

A man whose conviction was overturned after spending 10 years in prison has settled his wrongful conviction suit against the State of New York for $2 million.

Michael Clancy, 25, was working as an apprentice elevator mechanic when he was arrested for the March 30, 1997 murder of John Buono. ...

by Matt Clarke

In March 2012, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a $659,300 jury award in favor of two men who were arrested for public intoxication in New Orleans two days before Hurricane Katrina struck, and were then incarcerated for a month – sometimes under deplorable living conditions.

Robie J. Waganfeald and Paul W. Kunkel, Jr. were driving from Houston to Toledo when they stopped in New Orleans on August 26, 2005. They visited the French Quarter for about four hours and were arrested for public intoxication. Both men claimed they were not drunk, but that Kunkel fell down when his bad knee gave way as he stepped off a curb and Waganfeald was trying to help him regain his footing. Regardless of their guilt or innocence, what ensued was a nightmare by any standards.

The men were taken to the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) where they were stripped of their wallets and cellphones, booked and given access to the jail’s landline phones. The problem was that Hurricane Katrina was about two days from making landfall. This pending disaster resulted in so many people using their phones that the circuits overloaded, and the phones in OPP and other ...

by Matt Clarke

In a 7-0 opinion with two judges not participating, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held on February 15, 2012 that a former prisoner who claimed exculpatory evidence was withheld in his case, and who raised a free-standing claim of actual innocence based on the recantation of the prosecution’s primary eyewitness and deficient forensics evidence, had proven that he was actually innocent.

Richard Ray Miles, Jr. was convicted of murder and attempted murder in 1995, and sentenced to forty years in prison. During the trial an eyewitness identified him as the person who shot and killed one victim and wounded another, and a forensic expert testified that he had gunshot residue on his hands when arrested about 25 minutes after the shooting at a Dallas gas station. The fact that Miles’ clothing did not match that of the shooter, and that he was left-handed while the shooter was right-handed, did not deter the prosecution. Miles filed an appeal alleging tainted identification by the eyewitness. His initial state habeas action was based on the withholding of a police report which identified other people as the potential shooter. Both were denied.

Centurion Ministries, a non-profit organization that works on ...

by Matt Clarke

On May 18, 2012, the Supreme Court of Texas held that a former prisoner whose murder conviction was reversed due to ineffective assistance of counsel after he proved that he was likely actually innocent was entitled to compensation.

Billy Frederick Allen was convicted of a double homicide in 1984 and sentenced to 99 years. At his trial, a police officer, who was present with one of the fatally-wounded victims and two emergency medical technicians (EMTs), testified that the victim had identified the shooter as “Billy Allen.” Allen, who knew the victim, did not discover until many years after his conviction that the EMTs had heard a middle name, and one of them recalled it was “Wayne,” not Frederick. There was in fact a “Billy Wayne Allen” living in the area at the time of the murders; he was known as a violent drug dealer and had ties to the victim.

Based on this newly-discovered evidence, Allen filed multiple pro se petitions for a writ of habeas corpus without success, even when the trial court determined that his conviction should be reversed because it no longer had confidence in the verdict. Finally, Allen filed a habeas petition with ...

In 1971, during a time of racial unrest in Wilmington, North Carolina, shortly after schools were integrated and amid protests and race-based violence, a white-owned business, Mike’s Grocery, was firebombed. Responding firefighters claimed they were targeted by gunfire from unknown shooters at a nearby church.

Ten people were arrested, including Rev. Benjamin L. Chavis, Jr., a civil rights activist, and Connie Tindall, Marvin Patrick, Wayne Moore, Reginald Epps, Jerry Jacobs, James McKoy, Willie Earl Vereen, William Wright, Jr. and Ann Shepard. All except Shepard were black.

Following an initial mistrial they were convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1972 in connection with the firebombing, and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 15 to 34 years. The evidence against them included testimony from several witnesses, one of whom later recanted while another said he received a minibike in exchange for his testimony.

In 1978, then-Governor Jim Hunt reduced the sentences of the ten defendants, who became known as the Wilmington 10; two years later their convictions were overturned by the Fourth Circuit, which found that prosecutors had suppressed evidence in the case. See: Chavis v. State of North Carolina, 637 F.2d 213 (4th Cir. 1980). The Wilmington 10 were not retried. ...

Pentagon investigators are looking into allegations that an analyst at the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory (USACIL) botched hundreds of DNA tests, casting doubt about lab results in hundreds of prosecutions. An accused soldier who was forced to resign over allegations of sexual misconduct that were allegedly verified by USACIL is just one case where the lab’s questionable findings have adversely affected military careers.

Army Staff Sgt. Kirk Holcombe, 31, a decorated veteran who served in Iraq, was forced to take a discharge under less than honorable conditions, which barred him from receiving veterans’ medical benefits. According to his attorney, Duane Kees, “I think USACIL intentionally withholds, I don’t want to say their bad laundry, but their bad paperwork ... [they know] exactly what’s going to happen when they turn it over. It automatically calls into question their findings.”

After returning home from Iraq, Holcombe was stationed at Fort Knox in Kentucky in 2010 when an 11-year-old friend of his stepdaughter said that he tried to unzip her shorts while she was sleeping – a charge that Holcombe denied. While child protective services noted inconsistencies in the girl’s story and held the allegation was unsubstantiated, USACIL claimed it found DNA ...