In a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, a Louisiana man has won the right to a new trial after a major Brady Rule violation in his case has come to light. Juan Smith was convicted with for an armed robbery in which only one piece of evidence was used to convict him: a single surviving …
A man is once again free after serving 20 years on Delaware’s Death Row. Jermaine Wright’s sentence was overturned after his attorneys proved that, even with a videotaped confession, the evidence against him was not sufficient enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wright was indeed guilty. According to an article in the Delaware Times, Wright’s Superior …
In a case that was recently argued before the Supreme Court, questions have arisen regarding the reliability of eyewitness testimony. In Perry v. New Hampshire, the State Supreme Court ruled that a trial judge “cannot exclude witness identification based on suggestive circumstances, unless there was improper police manipulation of the identification” (e.g. witness tampering and …
After the release of a man that was wrongfully convicted of a murder, Florida’s Innocence Commission is rethinking the use of jailhouse informants in their felony cases. The man, Chad Heins, spent 11 years in prison for a murder he was innocent of — his conviction was almost solely based on the testimony of two so-called “snitches” …
Wrong Convictions Spur Florida to Rethink Using Jail Informants Read More »
According to a new study recently published by the RAND Corporation, just providing an indigent defendant a lawyer is not enough to “obtain justice”. The issues that directly affect the outcome include: whether the lawyer assigned is screened for quality, whether they are trained to handle the client’s type of case, and whether they are paid …
After spending 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Michael Morton was exonerated last month in Texas through the use of DNA evidence. In their attempt to prove Mr. Morton’s innocence, attorneys found evidence in court records that the prosecutor from his original trial had withheld critical evidence that may have helped Mr. …
Prosecutorial Misconduct and a DNA Exoneration in Texas Read More »
