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"W hen Gerard Richardson stood trial in Somerset County in 1995 for the brutal murder of a 19-year-old Elizabeth woman left for dead in a ditch in Bernards, a forensic dentist testified there was no question it was Richardson who left a bite mark on the woman's body. The testimony of Dr. Ira Titunik, a forensic odontologist, is largely what led to the conviction of Richardson for the February 1994 murder of Monica Reyes and a 30-year prison sentence handed down to him. But last year, analysis of DNA extracted from saliva left in the bite mark proved it wasn't Richardson at all who had bitten the victim, but someone else who has never been identified. Richardson, 49, walked out of a courtroom a free man in December after being wrongfully imprisoned for 19 years. He is the only defendant in New Jersey wrongfully convicted on bite-mark evidence to be exonerated."

When a San Jose man charged with murdering a Monte Sereno millionaire was suddenly freed last month, prosecutors acknowledged he had an airtight alibi - he was drunk and unconscious at a hospital when the victim was killed in his mansion miles away. But a mystery remained: How did the DNA of 26-year-old Lukis Anderson - who was so drunk his blood alcohol content was five times the legal limit - end up on the fingernails of slaying victim Raveesh "Ravi" Kumra? Santa Clara County prosecutors answered that question Wednesday, saying the same two paramedics who had treated Anderson for intoxication at a downtown San Jose liquor store in November had responded to Kumra's home just hours later.

It was a frighteningly close call for Charles Tubbins. The 23-year-old Buffalo man was already charged with murder and indicted by a grand jury for a crime he did not commit. All that was required for a wholesale miscarriage of justice was for the plea negotiations to begin, presenting Tubbins with the horrifying options of standing trial or admitting to a crime he didn't commit in hopes of a lesser sentence. It didn't come to that because DNA evidence found at the crime scene exonerated Tubbins and implicated another man, Ahkeem R. Huffman. To his credit, Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita moved quickly to dismiss the charges, but the case raises the same issues that have led to lengthy prison sentences for other innocent people in Erie County - issues of which law enforcement and the State Legislature are fully aware, but haven't seen fit to address. Tubbins was ensnared by the same human error that put Anthony Capozzi in prison for rapes he did not commit: witness misidentification. Eyewitness testimony was the only evidence against Tubbins, who, his lawyer noted, has no prior criminal convictions, no history of violence, no prior felony or misdemeanor.

In 1982, Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson were convicted of a brutal rape and murder in a small town in Oklahoma. The victim was 21-year-old Debra Sue Carter, a waitress at the Coachlight Club. Williamson and Fritz each spent more than 11 years in prison for a crime that DNA evidence later proved they did not commit. Before he went to prison, Fritz was raising his then-12-year-old daughter Elizabeth, alone. He decided she shouldn't visit him in prison, because he sensed she was scared. But, Fritz says, he knew his daughter loved him, and believed in his innocence. Elizabeth was 24 when Fritz got out, and he remembers the moment they saw each other in the visiting room of the county jail, where he'd been transferred prior to his release.

The 9,389 days Anthony Caravella wrongfully spent in prison still haunt him, but he was relieved Tuesday that two former police officers who put him away are finally being held accountable. Jurors decided that William Mantesta and George Pierson framed Caravella, then a mentally challenged 15 year old, for the 1983 rape and murder of a Miramar woman and should pay him $7 million for the close to 26 years he spent in prison.

Michael Morton, who spent nearly 25 years in a Texas prison before DNA testing exonerated him of his wife's murder, was married on Saturday in Liberty City, a small town in East Texas. The story of Morton's marriage to Cynthia May Chessman, a divorced mother with three children, has much to do with God and the First Baptist Church Liberty City, according to an article on Sunday in the wedding section of The New York Times, "Ready to Share a Life of Front-Page News."

Kirk Bloodsworth, Advocacy Director of Witness to Innocence and a death row exoneree, will speak on wrongful convictions and the death penalty at an event open to the public at Fort Hays State University on April 17th at 7:00pm. Bloodsworth was accused and convicted of a horrific crime: murdering and raping a nine year-old girl. The evidence used to convict him was the testimony of five eyewitnesses. He spent eight years in prison before DNA evidence proved his innocence. Bloodsworth is one of 142 individuals in the US to be sentenced to death and later found innocent.

A woman is facing a life sentence for leading a vigilante gang who tortured and brutally killed a teenager wrongly accused of rape.

Original Article01/08/2013Five killers carried out the 'extraordinarily callous, violent and brutal' murder of a teenager after the sister of one wrongly claimed he had raped her, a court heard today.[victim name withheld], 18, was punched and kic...

False confessions play a major role in two recent documentaries about wrongful convictions. West of Memphis examines the case of three young Arkansas men who were locked up for the horrific 1993 murders of three 8-year-old boys. Perhaps the most powerful piece of the prosecution's case was a confession by Jessie Misskelley describing in graphic detail how he and his two co-defendants beat, raped and mutilated the boys. The documentary, however, showed how the police could - after hours of intense interrogation, heavy with leading questions - manipulate and extract a false story from Misskelley, an unsophisticated young man with a low IQ.

Two Mississippi men spent a combined 30 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit. They were separately charged with sexually assaulting and murdering two 3-year-old girls - in two separate crimes - two years apart. The pathologist who conducted both autopsies said he suspected the girls had been bitten. They were innocent.

Investigators will lie, grill for hours on end and withhold exonerating evidence - in effect do anything - to extract a confession from a suspect they have pegged for a crime, a 1994 parolee seeking a retrial to clear his name in the 1963 kidnap-murder of a Saitama Prefecture girl said Thursday in Tokyo. Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Kazuo Ishikawa, who appeared with his lawyer, Taketoshi Nakayama, pointed to discrepancies in the kanji used in an apparent ransom demand for ¥200,000 and an earlier document he wrote and also alleged that the state looked to him as a usual suspect because of his roots in Japan's former outcast class known as the "burakumin." He continues to claim he is innocent.

Alan Gell had a history of bad behavior. By 1995, the 21-year-old North Carolinian had already been in trouble for drug offenses and car theft. But when Allen Ray Jenkins, a retired trucker, turned up dead that year with two shotgun blasts to the chest, authorities charged Gell with something far worse: first-degree murder. Gell spent the next nine years in prison - four of them on death row for the killing in Aulander, a town 120 miles east of Raleigh. There was just one problem. Gell never actually committed the crime.

Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on death row, just months before DNA exonerated him of raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl in Fort Lauderdale. Now, more than 13 years later, his family's civil lawsuit against the Broward Sheriff's Office and two detectives accused of framing him has finally been settled. Smith's death made him a national symbol because it was the first case in the U.S. that scientifically proved an innocent man had died in prison for a crime he didn't commit. But the financial settlement reached with the Sheriff's Office - on behalf of the agency and retired detectives Richard Scheff and Philip Amabile - is much less than the millions awarded in Broward's other notorious wrongful conviction cases. The civil suit was recently settled for just $340,000 - including attorney fees and legal costs, lawyers Michael Wrubel and James Green told the Sun Sentinel. They filed the lawsuit on behalf of Smith's closest surviving relative, his half-sister Virginia Smith, of Sunrise.

A teenager who spent months behind bars wrongly accused of rape after a DNA blunder has spoken of his 'relief, anger and disgust' after the charge was dropped. Adam Scott, 19, was due to stand trial next month in connection with a sex attack on a woman at Plant Hill Park in Blackley. The M.E.N. revealed yesterday how his DNA - taken in connection with a separate matter - had contaminated a sample from the victim while being processed at a laboratory run by LGC Forensics. Mr Scott, from Truro in Cornwall, is now considering taking legal action - and his lawyers are calling for a public inquiry into the blunder, which could lead to other rape and murder cases being reopened.

Original Article09/13/2013By Bruce FischerJeffrey Havard currently sits wrongfully convicted on death row in Mississippi for the sexual assault and murder of his girlfriend's six-month-old daughter. The truth is the infant slipped from Jeffrey's...

A man who spent 20 years in prison before being cleared of rape and murder charges by DNA evidence has won an initial battle in his bid to hold Lake County police and prosecutors financially responsible. Ruling on motions to dismiss Juan Rivera's lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber let almost every allegation in the suit go forward. The ruling allows Rivera to keep trying to hold prosecutors liable for his ordeal. A successful lawsuit against prosecutors is rare because they enjoy broad legal immunity, experts said. Leinenweber also declined to dismiss a defamation claim, meaning authorities could still be liable for publicly insisting on Rivera's guilt even after DNA indicated he didn't kill 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan in 1992. At issue are quotes from police and a prosecutor reported in the media, including an officer's assertion, reported by The New York Times shortly before Rivera was freed, that he was "guilty as the day is long."

Scenes of a Crime Documentary Description: "SCENES OF A CRIME" explores a nearly 10-hour interrogation that culminates in a disputed confession, and an intense, high-profile child murder trial in New York state. The film won an IFP Gotham Indep...

Original Article08/28/2013By JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH On a summer day in 1980, 19-year-old Andre Davis stepped off a train 125 miles south of his native Chicago. He expected his visit would last the summer. Little did he know he wouldn't return home...

The World Health Organisation is very fond of statistics and, in a report commissioned by the organisation and co-authored by two women, it is claimed that almost 38 per cent of all women murder victims were killed by intimate partners and 42 per cent of women who have been victims of physical or sexual violence by a partner suffer injuries as a result. The article exploits one high-profile gang rape in India and a celebrity cook's marital spat as somehow emblematic of this "wave of violence" against women. What the two authors forgot to mention is that 41 per cent of all forcible rape charges instituted by women are false and motivated by providing an alibi (serving the complainant's need to provide a plausible explanation for a consensual sexual encounter that might otherwise damage her reputation), for revenge (false rape reports having been used for centuries as a means of retaliation against rejecting males, Aristotle himself mentioning a few examples in his handbook on midwifery) and as an attention/sympathy-procuring device (this being the least harmful reason for which false rape charges are made in that no rape assailant is ever identified but which still plays into the hands of feminists and their shrill claims of rampant misogyny).