Mexican national Vicente Figueroa Benavides (pictured), wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Kern County, California for supposedly raping, sodomizing, and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter, will soon be freed after nearly 26 years on death row. He will be the 162nd person and fifth foreign national exonerated from a U.S. death row since 1973. In a media advisory on April 17, 2018, Kern District Attorney Lisa Green announced on April 17, 2018 that her office would be dropping all charges against Benavides, one month after the California Supreme Court vacated the former farmworker’s convictions for sexually assaulting and murdering Consuelo Verdugo, which the court called a product of “extensive,” “pervasive,” “impactful,” and “false” forensic testimony. The girl, the court said, had never been sexually assaulted and may actually have died from being hit by a car. At trial, the prosecution presented testimony from forensic pathologist Dr. James Diblin, who told the jury that Consuelo had died from “blunt force penetrating injury of the anus” and claimed that many of her internal injuries were the result of rape. He further testified that arm injuries, other internal trauma, dilated pupils, and compression rib fractures she had sustained had been “caused by tight squeezing during a sexual assault.” During post-conviction proceedings, Benavides’s lawyers presented evidence from Dr. Astrid Heger, one of the country’s leading experts on child abuse, debunking Diblin’s false testimony. Dr. Heger described Diblin’s assertion that Consuelo’s injuries had been the product of sexual assault as “so unlikely to the point of being absurd. … No such mechanism of injury has ever been reported in any literature of child abuse or child assault.” Rather, she said, the internal injuries Consuelo sustained were commonly seen in victims of automobile accidents. Hospital records and witness statements obtained by Benavides’s appeal lawyers also undermined Diblin’s false testimony. Records showed that the examining physicians from Consuelo’s initial hospitalization had not seen any signs of bleeding when she was brought to the emergency room, and a nurse who helped treat Consuelo reported that neither she nor any of her colleagues had seen evidence of anal or vaginal trauma when the child arrived. Indeed, the court said, the medical records showed that the injuries to Consuelo’s genitalia and anus that Diblin had claimed were evidence of sexual assault were actually “attribut[able] to medical intervention,” including repeated failed efforts to insert a catheter and the improper use of an adult-sized catheter on the small child. Associate Justice Carol Corrigan—a former prosecutor—described the forensic testimony that Benavides had brutally raped and anally sodomized Consuelo as “among the most hair-raising false evidence that I’ve encountered in all the time that I’ve been looking at criminal cases.” On appeal, prosecutors admitted that the forensic evidence they used to convict Benavides was false, but asked the state court to sustain a conviction for second-degree murder. Even after agreeing on April 17, 2018 to drop all charges, District Attorney Green refused to concede that Benavides was innocent of murder. “[I]t doesn’t mean he’s innocent of the physical child abuse,” she said. “My decision not to retry the case is not the same as a finding of factual innocence[.] I'm not stating in any way that he’s factually innocent of the death of the child.” At least ten men and women have been exonerated from death rows across the United States after having been wrongly convicted for killing a child. In the cases of Rodricus Crawford and Sabrina Butler, the medical evidence also showed that no crime had occurred, but the defendants were convicted based on false forensic testimony. Benavides is the fourth person exonerated from California’s death row since 1980. A California prison spokesperson said he is expected the be freed “within a few days,” as soon as the Kern County court orders his release. [UPDATE: The court formally dismissed all charges against Mr. Benavides and he was released on April 19, 2018.]

Forty-four former state and federal prosecutors and Department of Justice officials—including former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey—have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a new trial to Corey Williams (pictured), saying that Caddo Parish, Louisiana prosecutors violated their duty to ensure that “justice shall be done” by withholding exculpatory evidence in a murder case that sent an intellectually disabled teenager to death row. Williams’s petition alleges that police and prosecutors knew that Williams had been framed by the actual killers, that police coerced him to falsely confess, and that the prosecution deliberately withheld witness statements given to police that could have helped Williams prove he had been framed. No physical evidence linked Williams to the 1998 robbery and murder of Jarvis Griffin, who was delivering a pizza to a Shreveport home. Several witnesses said they saw Gabriel Logan, Nathan Logan, and Chris Moore (nicknamed “Rapist”) steal money and pizza from Griffin, while the sixteen-year-old Williams was simply standing outside at the time. The victim’s blood was found on Gabriel Logan’s sweatshirt; Nathan Logan’s fingerprints were found on the empty clip of the murder weapon; and Moore was in possession of some of the proceeds of the robbery. Only Moore claimed to have seen Williams commit the killing. Williams, who had intellectual disability caused by severe lead poisoning from regularly eating dirt and paint chips as a young child and who as a teenager still repeatedly urinated himself, initially told police he had nothing to do with the killing. But after six hours of police interrogation, Williams confessed to the murder. After detectives presented the older men with Williams’s confession, their stories changed to corroborate it. At trial, Caddo Parish prosecutor Hugo Holland presented the confession and Moore’s testimony as evidence of WIlliams’s guilt. Then, having withheld from the defense police statements that implicated his witnesses in framing Williams, Holland ridiculed the defense claim that Williams had been framed, calling it “the biggest set of circumstances concerning a conspiracy since John Kennedy was killed in 1963.” The prosecutors’ amicus brief in support of Williams states that “[t]he prosecutor’s goal is not only to strive for a fair trial, but also to protect public safety by ensuring that innocent persons are not convicted while the guilty remain free.” It stresses that this is a case in which, “[h]ad the statements not been withheld, there is a reasonable probability that the verdict would have been different.” Ben Cohen, Williams’s longtime lawyer, said that “[w]hat the prosecutor and the police did is outrageous. They knew Williams was innocent and they just went forward anyway.... They don’t think his life matters.” Eleven men have been exonerated from Louisiana's death row since the 1970s, including the Caddo Parish exonerations of Glen Ford and Rodricus Crawford. All eleven cases involved police and/or prosecutorial misconduct. Holland himself has been implicated in withholding witness statements in another capital prosecution showing the defendant had not participated in the killing. Holland was forced to resign his position as an assistant district attorney for Caddo Parish in 2012 after he and another prosecutor were caught falsifying federal forms in an attempt to obtain a cache of M-16 rifles for themselves through a Pentagon program that offers surplus military gear to police departments. Williams was released from death row after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Atkins v. Virginia, barring the death penalty for persons with intellectual disability, and is currently serving a life sentence.

Use of the death penalty declined worldwide in 2017, according to the Amnesty International’s annual global report on capital punishment. The human rights organization recorded 2,591 death sentences imposed in 53 countries in 2017, down 17% from the 3,117 death sentences it recorded from 55 countries in 2016. Executions also fell, with 23 nations carrying out a recorded 993 executions, off 4% from the the 1,032 executions recorded in 2016 and 39% below the 1,634 executions reported in 2015. Two more countries—Guinea and Mongolia—abolished capital punishment, increasing the number of abolitionist nations to 106, and Guatemala outlawed executions for “ordinary crimes” such as murder, bringing to 142 the number of nations Amnesty reports as having “abolished the death penalty in law or practice.” As in previous years, Amnesty’s execution total does not include the estimated thousands of executions carried out in China or executions in North Korea and Vietnam, all of which treat information on the death penalty as a state secret. Four countries—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan—which collectively accounted for 87% of the confirmed executions in the rest of the world in 2016, accounted for 84% of the world’s confirmed executions in 2017. The United States dropped to 8th in documented executions (23) in 2017 and ranked 11th in death sentences imposed. For the 9th consecutive year, it was the only country in the Americas to carry out executions. Among human rights violations, Amnesty reported that 15 countries imposed death sentences or executed people for drug-trade related offenses, with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore executing prisoners for involvement in the drug trade. The secrecy practices in Malaysia and Vietnam prevented Amnesty from determining whether similar human rights violations had occurred in those countries. “Despite strides towards abolishing this abhorrent punishment, there are still a few leaders who would resort to the death penalty as a ‘quick-fix’ rather than tackling problems at their roots with humane, effective and evidence-based policies,” said Amnesty’s Secretary General Salil Shetty. “The draconian anti-drug measures widely used in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific have totally failed to address the issue.” Amnesty also cited Iran for violating the human rights proscription against applying the death penalty to prisoners charged with offenses committed when they were younger than age 18. Iran executed five juvenile offenders in 2017, and has at least 80 others remaining on death row. Amnesty said Japan, the Maldives, Pakistan, Singapore, and the United States violated the international prohibition on executing prisoners with mental or intellectual disabilities or keeping such prisoners under sentence of death. Amnesty reported that at least 21,919 people were known to be on death rows around the world at the end of 2017.  

Twenty-two years after Walter Ogrod (pictured) was sentenced to death for a murder he insists he did not commit, a new Philadelphia District Attorney’s administration has dropped the office’s long-time opposition to Ogrod’s request for DNA testing and has referred the case for review by a revitalized Conviction Integrity Unit. As that review proceeds, an hour-long documentary on the case—aired April 8 as part of CNN’s Headline News Network series Death Row Stories—presents what Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch describes as “compelling evidence that the snitch testimony that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office used to convict Ogrod was fabricated” and that the confession the intellectually impaired man gave to Philadelphia police was coerced. Ogrod was sentenced to death in 1996 for the high-profile 1988 murder of 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn, whose body was found discarded in a television box on a Northeast Philadelphia street. No physical evidence linked Ogrod to the murder, but four years after the murder, police questioned the 25-year-old truck driver—variously described as “slow,” possibly autistic, and lacking “common sense”—for 14 hours, telling him he was repressing memories of the murder. In the documentary, a friend of Ogrod’s recounts that Ogrod signed a confession after police told him that if he didn’t, he would have to wait for a lawyer in a holding area with other prisoners and “you know what they do to child molesters down there.” Author Tom Lowenstein, who investigated the case and wrote the 2017 book The Trials of Walter Ogrod, says in the documentary that the 16-page confession, hand written by the detective, “is a flowing monologue of thought and process and description that Walter Ogrod is not capable of…. He could not have given the confession.” Ogrod was tried twice for the murder. In 1993, the jury in his first trial appeared to have acquitted him, filling out “not guilty” on the verdict sheet. But as the verdict was being read, one juror said he had changed his mind, resulting in a mistrial. Following the mistrial, Ogrod was celled with John Hall, a notorious (and later discredited) jailhouse informant nicknamed “The Monsignor” for his proclivity in producing confessions. Hall’s widow, Phyllis Hall, explains in the documentary that Hall introduced Ogrod to another prisoner, Jay Wolchansky, and worked with police and prosecutors to feed Wolchansky information to implicate Ogrod in the murder. Wolchansky then testified against Ogrod in his second trial, claiming that Ogrod had confessed. Phyllis Hall says her husband “would get some of the truth and he would sit in his cell and make up stories—and he was darned good at it.” For years, Philadelphia's district attorneys—first Lynne Abraham, who oversaw Ogrod’s prosecution, and later her successor, Seth Williams—fought requests from Ogrod’s lawyers to test DNA evidence that might prove his innocence. While campaigning for District Attorney in 2017, Krasner told Bunch “it is clear that for decades the practice and policy of the District Attorney’s Office has been to win convictions at any cost, too often at the cost of justice itself.” When he took office in January 2018, Krasner rankled many entrenched prosecutors by emphasizing a reform agenda that included a willingness to take a look at questionably obtained past convictions. Krasner has not spoken about the specifics of the Ogrod case, but told Bunch, “Four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn was murdered. If the wrong person went to death row for it—and I specify that I am saying if—then the person who did murder her walked free.”