False Accusers / Wrongly Accused

Citing procedural roadblocks in federal law, a federal appeals court panel has ruled it can have no say on whether a man serving life in prison for raping a girl in Jefferson Parish should get a new trial since the victim recanted her claims that the man sexually abused her in the 1990s.

As a conservative, I can appreciate certain Republicans' lack of tact in discussing certain topics. I hate political correctness. But there is a pretty large and, honestly, fair consensus that Republican officials hoping for a future should never, ever, dear God, never talk about rape. That's a bandwagon I can happily jump on. I am not a Republican official, however, so I am going to talk about rape; in particular, false accusations thereof. There is a screenshot on the Internet of a Facebook conversation between two women, Cassandra and Nancy. Here is their conversation (any typos or unnecessary punctuation are their own):

A Surrey man served four years in jail for a sex assault he may not have committed due to what the criminal justice branch is calling "a miscarriage of justice." Gurdev Singh Dhillon was alleged to have sexually assaulted a woman in 2004 and was sentenced to four years in jail in 2005. Appeals to both sentence and conviction were dismissed in 2006. However, in 2011, Crown counsel learned of the existence of material evidence that had not been disclosed by police.

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 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."

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.