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A WOMAN who sparked a major investigation after claiming she was raped as she walked home from a night out has been spared prison. Kirstie Hodgson was told by a Teesside Crown Court judge he would neither punish nor penalise her after hearing of her fragile mental state. The costly police probe was launched after Hodgson claimed she had been raped in Middlesbrough in the early hours of October 19, last year. She said the attacker told her he had a knife and stole her mobile telephone, and went on to point out the location of the alleged incident.

A girl of seven at the centre of a custody battle was coached by her mum to make fake claims that her father was a paedophile. Former jockey Victoria Haigh, 41, also launched a public campaign against her wholly innocent ex-partner [name withheld], a senior High Court judge said yesterday. After a series of private hearings, Sir Nicholas Wall decided to make his judgment public yesterday because "scandalous allegations" were put in the public domain "via email and the internet".

More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities. There is no official record-keeping system for exonerations of convicted criminals in the country, so academics set one up. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled. The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.

Original Article07/24/2013 Based on the data compiled in the NYS Wrongful Conviction Database, 35.5% of wrongful convictions since 1881 have been caused by official misconduct on the part of the prosecution and/or the police. This disregard for ...

Original Article11/13/2013 Here's a fascinating tidbit from the latest newsletter of the National Exonerations Registry with the same title as the headline of this post: In most known exonerations, the wrong person was convicted of a crime that ...

Of the 90,427 forcible rapes reported in 2007, 40% were cleared by arrest or "exceptional means" (FBI, 2008d) with 23,307 of those being arrests (FBI, 2008b). Clearance of a report by exceptional means occurs when the known suspect dies before an arrest is made, when the victim refuses to provide the information or assistance necessary to follow an investigation through to an arrest, or when the known suspect is being held in another jurisdiction for a different crime and extradition is denied. In order to clear a case by exceptional means, the officers must have an identified suspect, know where he can be found, and have enough evidence for a legal arrest.