False Accusers / Wrongly Accused

Serving a lengthy prison sentence for a rape he didn't commit, Robert E. Nelson asked for DNA testing to prove his innocence. Twice since 2009, he was turned down. In late 2011, Jackson County prosecutors working through cold cases sought testing for a very different reason: to find Nelson's accomplice. A few months later, as prosecutors were nearly finished with their testing, a judge approved Nelson's newest request.

A disgruntled man is accused of filing a false police report about a rape threat and possible hostage situation that shut down a Gresham neighborhood early Monday morning. Police said the report came in around 4:15 a.m. The caller said an armed man ordered him out of his apartment at gunpoint and threatened to rape his girlfriend. Police prepared for a possible standoff and surrounded a complex on Southeast 182nd Avenue near Stark Street, shutting down roads in the area for several blocks.

A Missouri man who spent three decades in prison for rape he didn't commit is now a free man. 49 year old Robert Nelson was convicted in 1984 of rape, sodomy and robbery. He was identified by the rape victim as one of the men involved in the crime. But after the Midwest Innocence Project got involved, Nelson's DNA was tested and showed that he was not the perpetrator.

A Cobb Superior Court judge Friday found that Mye Brindle, a former housekeeper of Waffle House Chairman Joe Rogers, violated his privacy when she unlawfully recorded video of them engaging in a sex act at his home. Rogers' attorneys hope the findings result in the dismissal of a sexual abuse case Brindle brought against Rogers. For the past nine months, attorneys for Rogers have tried to gather more information about Brindle's recording and whether her own lawyers, David Cohen and John Butters, were involved in helping to make it. Cobb Superior Court Judge Robert Leonard found that in June 2012, Cohe and Butters sent their client, Brindle, to a private investigator's office, who ordered Brindle a "spy camera," which she used to make a video in Roger's bedroom without his consent.

This Fathers Day, the Innocence Project pays tribute to the Diaz family, whose father, Luis Diaz was wrongfully imprisoned for 25 years. His three children fought for their father's release and helped him adjust after he finally came home at the age of 69. Luis became a suspect after a rape victim saw him at a gas station and thought that he resembled her attacker. Luis and Caridad Diaz were Cuban immigrants, and Luis had found work as a fry cook in Coral Gables, Florida, before his arrest threw the family into turmoil. His son Jose speaks of the night that his father was arrested, his father's trial and the years of prison visits that the family endured:

A GAY man found himself arrested and accused of a sex crime on a train simply because he was wearing a blue jacket. Chris Jones has been left feeling very distressed and shocked after his eight hour ordeal at the hands of British Transport Police officers. He has written to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to complain about their conduct and wants £200 compensation to make up for the loss of earnings for the time he had off work to recover from what happened.

The Long Beach Unified School District won a $2.6 million default judgment against a woman whose false rape allegation in 2002 cost the school district money and landed a fellow student in jail. Wanetta Gibson was a student at Long Beach Poly High when she first sued the district for having lax security and an unsafe environment after she accused Brian Banks, a promising football star, of rape.

A 49-year-old Kansas City man convicted in a 1983 rape has been released from prison after DNA testing exonerated him and implicated another man. The Kansas City Star reports here that Robert E. Nelson was freed Wednesday but that prosecutors and the Midwest Innocence Project withheld the announcement until Friday, after the new suspect was arrested. Nelson was twice denied DNA testing before the Midwest Innocence Project took on his case last year and spent more than $40,000 for tests that identified the new suspect. Nelson began serving the 70-year rape sentence in 2006 after finishing earlier sentences for robbery.

When you are a parent of a teen, there are no dearth of things to worry about. These days, it seems, false accusations of rape are one of them. There are a growing number of cases in which we are discovering an imprisoned young man was falsely accused. That fact was further highlighted when we learned that Wanetta Gibson's 1993 claim -- that her 17-year-old classmate Brian Banks had raped her -- turned out to be a lie. He spent five years of his life in prison before being exonerated. It's a tragedy that not only ruins that person's life, but also can cast doubt when other women come forward with truthful claims. Though, a recent ruling will make people as unscrupulous as Gibson think twice before lying.

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.

The National Registry of Exonerations is a joint project of the University of the Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. We provide detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989-cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges.

On the day before Thanksgiving in 2004, a 16-year-old girl walking to a friend's house on Buena Vista Avenue in Lemon Grove was sexually assaulted by a man who dragged her into the bushes near the Highway 94 underpass. She smashed his face with a CD player, fled to a passer-by's car and called the police. Although she was unable to provide enough details for a composite sketch, she described a truck with a camper shell she believed her attacker was driving. When a similar vehicle was spotted in Oceanside, the trail led detectives to Uriah Courtney, a 25-year-old construction worker from North Park. His picture was put in a photo lineup, and the victim, although not completely sure, picked him out. So did another witness from the crime scene. Courtney was arrested. The main evidence against him at trial was the eyewitness testimony. He was convicted of kidnapping and rape and sentenced to life. He told the victim in court he didn't do it and said he hoped the truth one day would come out.

Surrey Police is considering taking action against a teenager who falsely alleged she had been raped. The force said a "lot of staff" were involved in investigating the complaint, made in the early hours of Sunday, by an 18-year-old London woman. Police spent much of the day interviewing people in the Cox Lane area of Ewell and specialist officers supported the woman throughout the day. But police said she later told them the allegation was false.

A woman who claimed a taxi driver sexually assaulted her at knifepoint in his cab has been jailed after he used a recording application on his smartphone to expose her lies. Astria Berwick, 27, slashed herself in the face with a knife in an effort to convince police that she had been attacked and groped by Mohammed Asif. The driver was arrested within three hours and taken to a police station in handcuffs.

A teenager could face police action after making false allegations of sexual assault. Several Surrey Police units descended on the Cox Lane area of Ewell following allegations of a serious sexual assault between 6am-7am on Sunday.

A teenager who claimed to have been seriously sexually assaulted in Ewell yesterday has admitted that she fabricated the story, police have announced. Police units rushed to the Cox Lane area of Ewell where the incident was said to have occurred between 6am and 6.30am on Sunday, June 30. It had been reported to them by a third party at 6.45am after a woman in her late teens was found in a distressed state.

A Chicago man who spent 20 years in prison is freed after a new investigation reveals he had an alibi. Daniel Taylor was in police custody at the time and Saturday night he spoke out. Taylor was 17 years old when he says police coerced him into confessing. Taylor's exoneration is the 90th in Cook County since 1989. He is the 34th known to have been wrongfully convicted based on a unreliable confession.

When a San Jose man charged with murdering a Monte Sereno millionaire was suddenly freed last month, prosecutors acknowledged he had an airtight alibi - he was drunk and unconscious at a hospital when the victim was killed in his mansion miles away. But a mystery remained: How did the DNA of 26-year-old Lukis Anderson - who was so drunk his blood alcohol content was five times the legal limit - end up on the fingernails of slaying victim Raveesh "Ravi" Kumra? Santa Clara County prosecutors answered that question Wednesday, saying the same two paramedics who had treated Anderson for intoxication at a downtown San Jose liquor store in November had responded to Kumra's home just hours later.

The young woman who told police she was abducted and raped at a Queensbury town park has been charged with falsely reporting the attack after police determined she had been working as a prostitute and had arranged a sexual encounter with a man that night, police said. The 17-year-old from Glens Falls was charged with misdemeanor counts of prostitution, falsely reporting an incident and making a false written statement to police for her report that she was raped at Hovey Pond Park the night of June 15. Her name is being withheld because of her age.

A SOLDIER arrested for a rape that never happened told how the allegation has ruined his life - as his accuser was jailed for eight months. The young father's relationship fell apart amid whispering in his community after Philippa Costello claimed she had been attacked in April 2011. He was arrested and held for 15 hours, had intimate samples taken, and had to wait two months before the investigation against him was dropped.