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Only 10 On Your Side questioned Hampton's top cop about evidence that put an innocent man behind bars. Commonwealth's Attorney Anton Bell did not hold the office when a jury convicted Johnathon Montgomery of sexual assault, but explained the case in an exclusive interview with WAVY.com Wednesday. Elizabeth Coast originally testified Montgomery raped her when she was 10 years old and he was 14, but later admitted she made up the story. Montgomery spent four years in prison before Coast's confession.

HAMPTON -- The woman who was at the center of the case of a wrongly-convicted man was in Hampton District Court Tuesday on a perjury charge. Elizabeth Coast waived her right to a preliminary trial for felony perjury charges. It will now go to the Grand Jury to be certified for trial. Coast recanted her sexual assault allegation against Johnathon Montgomery, saying she lied at the 2008 trial to avoid scrutiny by her parents after she was caught looking for sexually explicit websites. Governor Bob McDonnell issued a conditional pardon for Montgomery in November, 2012 and ordered his immediate release from the prison. Montgomery spent 4 years in Greensville Correctional Center after being wrongfully convicted.

Elizabeth Jones, 22, admitted she lied about the latest rape allegation because she "did not like" the man she accused of attacking her, Southampton Crown Court was told. Her latest victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested and questioned for nine hours before being released without charge. After a judge jailed her for 16 months, it emerged today that she made her first complaint in 2004 aged just 13 before alleging other men had attacked her over the next nine years. In 2009 she was given a ten month detention and training order for a similar offence. Between 2005 and 2007 she had made eight other allegations, which police investigated, but she was never charged.

A Pittsburgh-area man who was dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by gun-wielding police based on accusations of sexual assault by a woman who later turned out to have invented the story says that the incident was "scary." Likely most people who have been in similar situations would agree. The story shows how sexual assault arrests are frequently based mostly, if not entirely, on the word of the alleged victim. The arrested man briefly dated the alleged victim before breaking up with her last summer. Several weeks later, he was asleep at his home when police banged on his door around 2 a.m. As he recalled, there were several officers loudly calling his name with their guns drawn. The arrest was based on the ex-girlfriend's claims that the man had followed her and her friends to a wave pool. He lured her into his vehicle, drove her to a parking lot before choking and raping her, the woman said. Her friends supposedly discovered them and scared off the man, who pushed the woman out of the car and drove away, she told police. Following the arrest, police spoke to the ex-girlfriend's friends. They contradicted her story, explaining that they had not been at the wave pool where the alleged sexual assault occurred. They said the ex-girlfriend had started dating a new man who had given her bruises on her neck and she did not want her parents to find out so she made up the assault. After confirming this account, police released the man and arrested the ex-girlfriend on suspicion of making false statement and perjury.

Police say a man who claimed he was sexually assaulted by two male attackers had "made the story up". Officers have now cancelled an investigation launched after the 20-year-old said he had been subjected to an attack in Carlisle during the early hours of the morning. The force confirmed the man who made the allegation admitted last night that it did not actually happen. The inquiry had been launched on Sunday night after police were told a man was assaulted as he walked home alone "in the vicinity of" the Lower Viaduct area on Saturday morning. Investigations had focussed on allegations he was pushed into a car park by two male attackers and "subjected to a serious sexual assault".

Kelsey Long was already in fairly significant trouble. After a report of someone throwing eggs at cars and houses in Martinez early Easter morning, the 23-year-old Evans woman was reportedly stopped while driving a car on a suspended license, and with no insurance or valid vehicle registration. Allegedly with drugs in the vehicle. Then she had to be physically restrained after trying to flee. But spreading Easter cheer through vandalism and resisting arrest wasn't enough. She had to make things even worse. Much worse. Long is now charged with falsely claiming that the arresting Columbia County deputy raped her. In the 30 to 45 seconds it took to restrain her in a Martinez yard. As another officer stood by. Not even her own passenger saw anything resembling such a thing.

A 25-year-old man falsely accused of rape says he spent the past 18 months "in a living hell". Gerard Doherty now wants the law changed to protect the identity of men accused of sex offences. He also says that, while he feels sorry for his accuser, women who make false claims of rape should be named and face prosecution. Mr Doherty said he had never been in a police station or inside a court in his life until a woman he was in a hotel bedroom with said she was raped by him. The father of one always denied raping and sexually assaulting the woman and this week a jury in Londonderry agreed that he did not commit the offence.

A House fiscal committee heard public testimony Tuesday on a measure that would allow people who were wrongfully convicted to seek compensation from the state for the years they lost behind bars. If passed, Washington would join 27 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government with similar laws on the books.

A woman suspected by police of making up a sexual assault has been fined. A 43-year-old woman from Chippenham alleged she had been sexually assaulted in the town in the early hours of Sunday. Police cordonned off an area beneath the railway arches at the top of High Street, an area well covered by security cameras. The tape was taken down on Sunday afternoon.

After two-and-a-half hours of deliberation, a jury of seven women and five men found Jordan Johnson not guilty of rape. Johnson broke into tears as his attorneys, David Paoli and Kirsten Pabst buried him in a group hug. Upon hearing the verdict, Johnson's mother said, "Thank God," and burst into sobs. His father cheered in celebration. Others in the courtroom cheered and a few Griz football players' eyes filled with tears. The woman was not present in the courtroom. The case was a classic "he-said, she-said." Expert witnesses on both sides deemed the limited physical evidence inconclusive.

A reported rape on the UC Santa Cruz campus that shocked a community already on edge has turned out to be a hoax, UCSC police said Thursday. The attack was alleged to have occurred in broad daylight just after noon on Sunday, Feb. 17, just days after the shooting of a student as she waited for a bus. The 21-year-old woman, who initially told police she was raped and physically assaulted by a stranger, now has admitted to campus police investigators that she fabricated the attack, University Police Chief Nader Oweis said.

Lee Finlayson, a captain with the Grand Rapids fire department, was arrested and locked up for two weeks after his girlfriend filed criminal charges against him including rape. The charges were later dropped after evidence that the text messages used as evidence against him were fake. Finlayson said he lost two weeks of his life and spent $10,000 trying to prove his innocence. As firefighters go, Captain Finlayson is considered one of the best. He was voted the 2011 Grand Rapids firefighter of the year. In September however, he was arrested stemming from a warrant out of Pennsylvania. "You are given absolutely zero information," said Finlayson. "Nobody will talk to you."

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.

I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act. But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged-by an ex-girlfriend-with alleged acts of "nonconsensual sex" that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier. What followed was a nightmare-a fall through Alice's looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment. It began with a text of desperation. "CALL ME. URGENT. NOW."

A 15-year-old girl is being charged with making a false police report after claiming she was raped at a Revere High School basketball game in December. The girl told police she was assaulted by a white male teen during a boys basketball game Dec. 7. But Police Chief Michael McNeely said in a press release that "the allegation was determined to be false after a lengthy and thorough investigation by Bath police."

In 1984, when I was just 21, I was convicted of a rape I did not commit. DNA evidence would subsequently prove my innocence, but not before I spent a decade behind bars. Nothing is more horrifying than prison life when you know you shouldn't be there. You lose more than just your freedom; you lose your very identity. The experience of being wrongfully convicted is truly unusual. Only others who have spent time in prison for a crime they didn't commit can fully appreciate the nightmare.

A woman has been fined £80 for wasting police time after making up a false allegation of attempted rape in Swindon. The 21-year-old claimed she had been grabbed by a man as she walked around Liden Lagoon earlier in the month. A man matching the description given by the woman was later arrested. Police said the woman had now admitted to making up the entire incident and she had received a fixed penalty fine for the offence. Det Insp Mark Garrett said: "Wiltshire Police take any reports of sexual assaults incredibly seriously and will use all available resources to bring perpetrators of these crimes to justice. "This inquiry has taken up a lot of police time and resources but also resulted in an innocent man being arrested on suspicion of a very serious crime."

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.