Innocence
,Race
,Representation
,Upcoming Executions
,Feb 28, 2020
Nathaniel Woods (pictured, left) did not shoot Alabama police officers Charles Bennett, Carlos “Curly” Owen, and Harley Chisholm III (pictured left to right, below). But because of alleged police misconduct, incom…
Innocence
,Jun 01, 2021
California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered an independent investigation into the case of Kevin Cooper, who has consistently maintained his innocence in the 1983 quadruple-murder for which he was sentenced to dea…
Jun 14, 2021
NEWS (6/9/21) — Nebraska: A panel of three judges has sentenced Aubrey Trail to death for the 2017 killing of Sydney Loofe. In a s…
Innocence
,Race
,Sep 13, 2021
Former Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Flowers (pictured), who was exonerated in 2020, is suing the officials whose misconduct led to his arrest and repeated wrongful conviction. Flowers was tried six times…
Innocence
,Mar 01, 2024
On February 27, 2024, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara A. McDermott approved a motion from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to dismiss first-degree murd…
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Aug 06, 2021
A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has found that law enforcement use or threat of capital prosecution against suspects or witnesses contributed to the w…
Innocence
,Apr 24, 2020
A federal judge has ruled that a civil rights lawsuit against a detective who allegedly framed a Kentucky woman for a murder she was physically incapable of committing may proceed to a jury trial. On April 1, 2020, U.S. D…
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Aug 11, 2022
An Illinois woman who was sentenced to death without a trial as a result of a false confession coerced by a disgraced Chicago detective has been exonerated after 29 years. Marilyn Mulero …
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Clemency
,Jan 11, 2023
January 11, 2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of former Illinois Governor George Ryan’s decision to grant clemency to every death row prisoner in Illinois, the largest blanket clemency in the modern era of the death penalty. It was a watershed …
Innocence
,Aug 16, 2021
NBC’s true crime series, Dateline, featured an episode on August 13, 2021 on the wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration of former Philadelphia death-row prisoner Walter Ogrod (pictured). The episode, entitled “The I…
May 20, 2021
A former mitigation investigator for the Georgia Office of the Capital Defender has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against two Georgia Department of Corrections investigators and the warden of the state’s ma…
Innocence
,Mar 13, 2020
NEWS (3/13/20): The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission voted 5 – 3 on March 13, 2020 to empanel a three-judge review committee to determine whether four men convicted as teens should be exonerated of the mu…
Innocence
,Intellectual Disability
,May 17, 2021
In a case the late Justice Antonin Scalia touted as a justification for capital punishment, a North Carolina federal jury has awarded two intellectually disabled death-row exonerees $75 million for the police misconduct that sent …
Innocence
,May 12, 2020
The city of Cleveland will pay a record $18 million dollars to settle a civil rights lawsuit by three former death-row prisoners who, as a result of police misconduct, spent more than a combined 80 years imprisoned for a murder they did not commit…
Innocence
,Jun 21, 2004
In an exclusive two-part series titled “Snitch Work,” Philadelphia’s City Paper explores the possible innocence of Pennsylvania death row inmate Walter Ogrod. Investigative writer Tom Lowenstein describes Ogrod’s first trial, which resulted in a m…
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Race
,Oct 08, 2020
A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations has found that police or prosecutorial misconduct is rampant in death-row exoneration cases and occurs even more frequently when the wrongfully death-sentenced exoneree is Blac…
Innocence
,Race
,Sentencing Alternatives
,Sep 19, 2022
Bell County prosecutors have dropped their efforts to impose the death penalty on Marvin Guy (pictured), an African American man who has been held eight years without trial in connection with the death of a white…
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Dec 01, 2022
A Utah judge has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Douglas Carter, finding that prosecutors knowingly withheld from the defense evidence that police coerced false testimony from two key witnesses, coached …
