False Accusers / Wrongly Accused

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".

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."

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.

Oswego -- An Oswego city councilor has filed a lawsuit against SUNY Oswego's student-run newspaper, The Oswegonian, after the newspaper mistakenly identified him as a registered sex offender. Councilor Mike Todd, R-3rd Ward, filed the court action after The Oswegonian published a news story identifying him as a registered sex offender and co-owner of a taxi company. Todd is neither. The suit alleges that the newspaper made a "false and defamatory statement" causing Todd "financial loss, ridicule and public humiliation."

A Nelson woman who said she was sexually assaulted while hitchhiking in the Maitai Valley last month fabricated the complaint, police say. The 21-year-old woman said she was hitchhiking from Richmond to Nelson on February 15 when she was picked up by a man in his 70s. She said he locked her in the car and drove to the Maitai Valley near Nelson where he sexually assaulted her. A police investigation has revealed the complaint was fabricated. Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne McCoy said such complaints received priority and significant time and resources had been tied up investigating it. "To receive a false complaint is disappointing on several fronts. Resources that could have been used investigating other genuine complaints had been tied up and on top of that the public of Nelson have been led to believe they should be fearful for their safety," said Mr McCoy. The woman would be summonsed for making a false complaint to police.

A college newspaper is again the subject of a libel lawsuit. The Oswegonian, State University of New York-Oswego's "only independent, not for profit, student run newspaper," is being sued for libel after it wrongly identified local city councilor Michael Todd as "a registered sex offender and co-owner of a taxi company" when he "is neither," Syracuse.com reported. The Feb. 15 story in question reports on Todd's proposed law against taxi companies hiring sex offenders but then wrongly reports "Todd is a registered sex offender and manager of D&M taxi company with his brother, Brian Savage."

Andrew Johnson maintained for more than two decades that he wasn't responsible for a 1989 Cheyenne rape charge that landed him a life sentence in prison. Then came the news Tuesday morning: Initial DNA tests confirmed his innocence. Attorneys from the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center have already filed a motion in Wyoming's Laramie County District Court for a new trial on Johnson's behalf. In the early morning hours of June 10, 1989, Cheyenne police received a 911 call from a woman who called for her neighbor.

Three women were paid to falsely claim in videotaped interviews that they had sex for money with U.S. Senator Robert Menendez in the Dominican Republic, a spokesman for the police said today. The women, whose claims generated media attention in the United States, were hired by a Dominican attorney to make the videotaped statements, spokesman Maximo Baez told reporters. Two of the women received about $425 and the other was paid about $300, he said. Authorities are seeking to interrogate the attorney, Melanio Figueroa, about the payments and have not determined his motive or whether he was in turn paid by someone else to set up the interviews, Baez said.

A man was arrested after a 78-year-old Limpopo pensioner reported that she had allegedly been raped. After identifying a suspect 26 years younger than the complainant, the police pounced. But hours later, police released the 52-year-old man from custody and dropped the rape case. Police have now charged the septuagenarian from Nkowankowa township outside Tzaneen with perjury. Limpopo police spokesman Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi said she had lied about the rape. Police investigations seemed to indicate that the pensioner had fabricated the rape allegation after the man spurned her advances.

An 18-year-old Venetia woman is facing perjury charges after investigators said she lied about being raped in the parking lot of the South Park wave pool last year. According to the criminal complaint, Katelyn Webster told authorities she raped by Matthew Folino while sitting in the pool's parking lot in June 2012. Webster told police that Folino put his hands around her neck to hold her down. There were marks on her neck to validate her story.

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.

A 20-year-old North Dakota State University student appeared in court Thursday after police say she made a false sexual assault report late Sunday night. Mary Gullickson pleaded guilty to her misdemeanor charges of providing false information to law enforcement and received a one-year suspended sentence along with a year of supervised probation. Police say Gullickson was involved in a rape fantasy she set up with another man on Craigslist, and that her boyfriend forced to her to make the bogus claim after he found out. Cass County prosecutors say Gullickson will also have to cover the costs of the rape investigation.

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.

HAMPTON - A woman who falsely accused a Hampton man of sex crimes pleaded guilty Tuesday morning. Elizabeth Coast faces up to 10 years in prison for perjury when she's sentenced on August 19. During her the trial in June 2008, she said Johnathon Montgomery forced her to perform oral sex. He was convicted and sent to prison. He was released just before Thanksgiving 2012 after more than four years behind bars after Coast admitted she lied to avoid scrutiny by her parents after she was caught looking for sexually explicit websites. Governor Bob McDonnell issued a conditional pardon for Montgomery and ordered his immediate release. The prosecution said Coast confessed to a police officer friend that she lied and added the she and Montgomery had never done anything.

A LYING teenager who falsely accused her ex-boyfriend of rape was jailed for 12 months yesterday. Spiteful Amanda Bradley, 19, texted her new partner to say she had been attacked. He called police and the 28-year-old ex was arrested while still in Bradley's bedroom. The accused man insisted Bradley agreed to sex - but had to endure a three-month nightmare before she admitted lying. Judge Steven Everett told the teenager: "You knew full well you were going to get him into trouble in a very big way."

KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) - A Jackson County judge has ordered the release of a man wrongfully convicted of rape and robbery in 1984. In a news release issued Friday afternoon, the Midwest Innocence Project said the release occurred on Wednesday. DNA evidence exonerated Robert Nelson, who did not appear at a news conference Friday. He was picked up earlier this week by his sister and her family. "The flaws in our justice system can only be corrected by those who seek the truth," said Laura O'Sullivan, legal director of the Midwest Innocence Project. "Thankfully, the Jackson County prosecutors were interested in seeking the truth. Their cooperation led to Robert Nelson's release and identification of the true perpetrators in this crime. But that is the only silver lining to the tragedy that Robert endured: convicted of a crime he did not commit."

Authorities Friday accused a Lower Merion woman of lying under oath about being sexually assaulted and stalked by one township police officer and illegally detained by another. These lies, first made public when the woman appeared at a meeting of the tow

A woman accused of making an untrue claim of a sexual assault in October at Spring Arbor University has been charged with a felony. Brittni Johnson, 22, of Jackson, a student at the school, was jailed about 7 p.m. Thursday and arraigned today on a charge