Entries tagged with “Montez Spradley”
Policy Issues
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Jan 19, 2018
“Innocence Deniers” and Coercive Plea Agreements Impede Death-Row Exonerations Across the U.S.
A prosecutor’s duty, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1935, “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Yet prosecutors across the U.S. have refused to acknowledge the innocence of defendants who have been wrongfully convicted, obstructing release by retrying death-sentenced defendants despite exonerating evidence, or conditioning their release upon “Alford pleas,” which force defendants to choose between clearing their names or obtaining their freedom. In an article for…
Policy Issues
Innocence
,New Voices
,Nov 15, 2016
OUTLIER COUNTIES: Alabama’s Leading Death Sentencing County Elects Prosecutors Who Oppose Capital Punishment
Jefferson County, Alabama is among both the 2% of counties that account for more than half of all executions in the U.S. and are responsible for more than half of all prisoners on death row across the country. It led the state in new death sentences from 2010 – 2015, putting more people on death row than 99.5% of U.S. counties. All five of the defendants sentenced to death in those cases were…
Policy Issues
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Dec 20, 2019
With Newly Discovered Evidence of Prosecutorial Misconduct, Alabama Death-Row Prisoner Hopeful to Win New Trial
Alabama sentenced Toforest Johnson to death, his lawyers and national experts say, because of prosecutorial misconduct, false eyewitness testimony, and inadequate representation. In an amicus brief filed in a Birmingham trial court on December 12, 2019, the Innocence Project says, “If ever a case bore the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction, Toforest Johnson’s is…