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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.

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.

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.

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...

The most common question about false convictions is also the simplest: How many are there? The answer, unfortunately, is almost always the same and always disappointing: We don't know. Recently, however, we have learned enough to be able to qualify our ignorance in two important respects. We can put a lower bound on the frequency of false convictions among death sentences in the United States since 1973, and we have some early indications of the rate of false convictions for rape in Virginia in the 1970s and early 1980s. These new sources of information suggest - tentatively - that the rate of false convictions for serious violent felonies in the United States may be somewhere in the range from 1% to 5%. Beyond that - for less serious crimes and for other countries - our ignorance is untouched.

NEW ORLEANS -- Some questions seem particularly prone to set John Thompson off. Here's one he gets a lot: Have the prosecutors who sent him to death row ever apologized? "Sorry? For what?" says Thompson. The 49-year-old is lean, almost skinny. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes and sports a thin mustache and soul patch, both stippled with gray. "You tell me that. Tell me what the hell would they be sorry for. They tried to kill me. To apologize would mean they're admitting the system is broken." His voice has been gradually increasing in volume. He's nearly yelling now. "That everyone around them is broken. It's the same motherfucking system that's protecting them."

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...

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.

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.

Lee James (left) & Stephen Norley Original Article11/28/2013By Steven Morris A man who killed a disabled neighbour in a vicious vigilante attack because he wrongly believed he was a paedophile will serve at least 18 years in prison for what the...

Stephen Norley & Lee James Original ArticleThis is more proof of why the online hit-list (registry) should be taken offline and used by police only!10/28/2013BRISTOL - A man wrongly accused of being a pedophile was beaten unconscious, set on fi...