Free Republic

Twenty years after he was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, Scott Peterson has a new ally in his fight to prove he didn't commit the crime. The Los Angeles Innocence Project is now working with Peterson, according to news outlets in California. It's an important shift in Peterson's case. Up to now, many of his attorneys' efforts have focused on overturning his death sentence — an effort that succeeded in 2020. Peterson, 51, is now seeking exoneration and to free himself from serving a life sentence. The Los Angeles Innocence Project issued a widely cited statement Thursday...

Special Prosecutor Thomas Plymale dismissed all charges against Philip Barnett, who spent 10 years in prison for a crime DNA testing proved he did not commit. Charges were also dropped against his co-defendants Nathan Barnett, Philip’s brother, and Justin Black. A fourth defendant, Brian Dement, accepted a sentence modification of time served. All four men were convicted of the 2002 murder of a young woman in Cabell County, W.Va. “Today is a great day for the Barnett family; Philip and Nathan’s names are finally cleared. The DNA results from the crime scene evidence, which excluded Philip and Nathan and matched...

Dirty cops. A bogus eyewitness. Years in violent prisons. And a liberal politician whose star keeps rising. Jamal Trulove almost saw it coming. He figured he might be arrested, or at least spend some quality time with police, after his friend Seu Kuka was shot and killed one warm night in July 2007. "When somebody dies in the hood, everybody feels like they’re involved," he explained recently, during a sit-down with VICE at the clubhouse of United Playaz, a violence-prevention nonprofit based in his hometown of San Francisco. "When someone gets killed, you can plan on getting jacked up by...

A man who spent nearly two decades in prison after being wrongly convicted of murder has dubbed Kamala Harris an 'opportunist' who should recognize she has 'ruined a few lives' during her time as a prosecutor. Harris, 55, who was added to the Democratic ticket last week, served as the San Francisco District Attorney between 2003 and 2010 before becoming California's Attorney General. Now her record in both roles is coming under scrutiny as she prepares to battle for the White House alongside Joe Biden.

FULL TITLE: 'Clear causal link': Lawyers accuse Kamala Harris of defying Supreme Court by hiding evidence from defense attorneys While district attorney for San Francisco, Kamala Harris withheld evidence that could have exonerated defendants on multiple occasions, in violation of a key due process ruling by the Supreme Court. Between 2004 and 2010, Harris’s office failed to inform defense attorneys about criminal and professional misconduct records that raised questions about the credibility of government witnesses. The lapses led to the dismissal of nearly 1,000 cases and a scathing 2010 ruling by a Superior Court judge that accused Harris’ office of...

A man freed from prison in May after a judge vacated his 1991 rape conviction in Westmoreland County was arrested Thursday on charges of sexually assaulting a 7-year-old child at his home in McKees Rocks. John Kunco, 53, previously of Harrison, was arraigned Friday on charges of aggravated indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, corruption, endangering the welfare of children and indecent assault. Court documents list the date of the offenses as May 23, the day Kunco was released from prison after serving nearly 28 years of a 45- to 90-year sentence in an unrelated rape case. Last week,...

A brief look at the most egregious examples from the last 40 yearsAnnoyed at federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel's persistent rulings against him in the Trump University case (brought by a law firm that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by Bill and Hillary), Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that maybe it's because the judge is a second-generation Mexican immigrant. The entire media -- and most of the GOP -- have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he'll build a wall. Now they're outraged...

A few months after lefty activists crowded Washington D.C. for the Women's March, activists from many of those same organizations went to bat for a serial rapist and murderer. Ledell Lee's victims were all women.  While he was on trial for the rape and murder of Debra Reese, the testimony of three of his rape victims was presented. Lee had made a habit of knocking on doors and asking to borrow some tools to see whether a woman's husband might be home. Debra Reese called her mother and told her that a strange man had tried to borrow some tools....

A wrongfully convicted man filed a $40 million lawsuit on Tuesday against Northwestern University, a former journalism professor, a private investigator and an attorney, accusing them of framing him for a double murder to get another man released. Alstory Simon, 64, of Ohio, claims in the lawsuit that he was the victim of unethical tactics by a team focused on freeing another man in what became a celebrated Illinois wrongful conviction case. Simon was imprisoned in 1999 after confessing to the 1982 murder of two people in a park, and spent more than 15 years behind bars before he was...

A judge in Hattiesburg, Mississippi today threw out the guilty pleas of two men who had spent three decades in prison for rape and murder after DNA tests showed they were innocent. The decision comes too late, however, for a third man who died in prison eight years ago. Bobby Dixon, Phillip Bivens and Larry Ruffin were sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of Eva Gail Patterson of Hattiesburg in 1979. Larry Ruffin died behind bars in 2002. The Innocence Project filed a petition in July on behalf of Dixon and Bivens and a separate petition...

Chicago prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades and other material regarding the classroom performance of Northwestern University journalism students, according to The New York Times. Seems the prosecutors are tired of being second-guessed by the J-students, who are participants in The Innocence Project. The Innocence Project is an effort by Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism to provide students with real-life experience in scrutinizing the actions of police and prosecutors in old cases. Their work has led to the release of at least 11 inmates who were shown to have been wrongly convicted. It's that success rate that has the local DAs...

Wrongly convicted Texans become instant millionaires New law makes Texas most generous state for payments to cleared prisoners.DALLAS — Thomas McGowan's journey from prison to prosperity is about to culminate in $1.8 million, and he knows just how to spend it: on a house with three bedrooms, stainless steel kitchen appliances and a washer and dryer. "I'll let my girlfriend pick out the rest," said McGowan, who was exonerated last year based on DNA evidence after spending nearly 23 years in prison for rape and robbery. He and other exonerees in Texas, which leads the nation in freeing the...

Exonerees will get $80,000 for each year they spent behind bars. The compensation also includes lifetime annuity payments that for most of the wrongly convicted are worth between $40,000 and $50,000 a year — making it by far the nation's most generous package. Dallas County alone has 21 cases in which a judge overturned guilty verdicts based on DNA evidence, though prosecutors plan to retry one of those.

The saga of the scandal-plagued Democratic fundraiser with ties to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton took another strange twist after he mailed a suicide note last week to a legal organization. A person who saw the letter said Thursday that the note from Hong Kong-born Norman Hsu explicitly stated that he "intended to commit suicide." The person declined to reveal the exact phrasing, but said it was not rambling in nature. The individual spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it. The letter arrived at the New York offices of...

NEW YORK - The saga of the scandal-plagued Democratic fundraiser with ties to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton took another strange twist after he mailed a suicide note last week to a legal organization. A person who saw the letter said Thursday that the note from Norman Hsu explicitly stated that he "intended to commit suicide." The person declined to reveal the exact phrasing, but said it was not rambling in nature. The individual spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it. The letter arrived at the New York offices...

John Grisham, author of "The Innocent Man", published by "Doubleday Random House" and Dennis Fritz author of "Journey Toward Justice", published by "Seven Locks Press" Santa Ana, CA have a long term commitment to making appearances related to "the innocence movement" nationwide. Grisham's first nonfiction book, "The Innocent Man" is a best seller on Amazon worldwide. Dennis Fritz has his first book "Journey Toward Justice" on Amazon and is a top seller worldwide. The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, is a chronicle of the Oklahoma case that resulted in the wrongful conviction of former minor-league baseball...

Four of the nation's top arson experts have concluded that the state of Texas executed a man in 2004 based on scientifically invalid evidence, and on Tuesday they called for an official reinvestigation of the case. In their report, the experts, assembled by the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization responsible for scores of exonerations, concluded that the conviction and 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for the arson-murders of his three daughters were based on interpretations by fire investigators that have been scientifically disproved. "The whole system has broken down," Barry Scheck, co-founder and director of the Innocence Project, said...

MADISON, WI (AP) -- The Wisconsin Innocence Project pulled a photo from its Web site on Friday of a man the group helped free from prison - one day after gruesome details emerged about his alleged rape and murder of a young photographer. The group's action to distance itself from one of its best known cases came after prosecutors alleged in graphic detail that Steven Avery and his 16-year-old nephew raped and murdered 25-year-old Teresa Halbach on Halloween. Prosecutors said Avery lured Halbach, a freelance photographer for Auto Trader Magazine, to his property near Mishicot to take a picture of...

Man goes free after 19 years in prison for rape he did not commit DNA testing exonerates Thomas Doswell, who speaks of forgiveness Tuesday, August 02, 2005 By Bill Moushey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Thomas Doswell missed out on many things during the 19 years he served in prison for a rape he didn't commit. Not the least was being refused permission to attend his father's funeral. Confined behind bars that day, Doswell did what he could: He sang "Amazing Grace" over the telephone during the services. It was just one of the memories of events unattended and embraces missed that flooded...

Just 4 1/2 hours before his scheduled execution, Robin Lovitt was given a legal reprieve today by the U.S. Supreme Court, which stayed his death sentence until the fall, when it will consider whether his case deserves a full hearing on its merits. The decision was relayed to lawyers about 4:30 p.m. after a tense day of waiting among many in the case -- and after Lovitt's family members had bid him goodbye, not knowing whether he would be put to death. When the word came, his sister Tangala Carter said she was gathered in a room with other relatives....