Category Archives: Innocence Project

After nearly two decades of being wrongfully convicted, two men from Texas are finally seeing their day in the sun. Stanley Mozee and Dennis Lee Allen have been declared “actually innocent” as of May 11, 2019 after being wrongfully convicted of murder in 2000. Although there was no physical evidence that connected them to the murder, they were still convicted and sentenced to a life imprisonment.

April Alley watched as her father was executed by lethal injection in 2006 for raping and murdering a 19-year-old Marine in 1985.
Now, she is fighting to find out if her father, Sedley Alley, committed the crime. She has petitioned Shelby County Criminal Court to test the DNA evidence in the case. The petition for post-conviction testing of the DNA was filed April 30.
The case is a first of its kind, using DNA evidence in an attempt to clear someone already executed.

It seems both improbable and inevitable that Jeffrey Deskovic would be among the 2019 graduates of Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law.
The legal system destroyed Deskovic’s life. At 17, he was found guilty of the rape and murder of a classmate, crimes he didn’t commit.
Then lawyers saved him. After years of rejections, the Innocence Project won a recheck of DNA evidence that was matched to the real killer.

Nine years ago Sunday, a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge gave Towler his life back. Towler was formally exonerated after serving nearly three decades in prison because of a September 1981 verdict. At the time of his release, only a few people across the country had served more time for a wrongful conviction.

The Hawaii Innocence Project, a troop of attorneys and University of Hawaii law students striving to exonerate innocent prisoners, has a new top litigator.
Longtime Hawaii attorney L. Richard “Rick” Fried Jr. has joined HIP as a volunteer co-director, a role he now shares with faculty specialist Ken Lawson.

Adnan Syed’s supporters do not seem to be backing down without a fight.
After Maryland’s highest court ruled that the “Serial” subject would not get a new trial, Syed’s lawyer tweeted that he’ll take the case to the highest court in the land.
“We will petition to the Supreme Court,” Justin Brown tweeted Friday.

Given the new DNA evidence plus the weaknesses of the evidence used to convict Prudholm, the Bossier Parish District Attorney’s office and Prudholm agreeded to Alford plea, allowing him to maintain his innocence in exchange for immediate release.

Dale Recinella steeled himself as he entered Florida’s death row and the rank smell of men who lived year-round with no air conditioning. The electronic door grinded as it closed behind him.
The Catholic chaplain’s Rockports squeaked on the concrete corridor as he walked from cell to cell, on that day in 1999.
Recinella had been a Wall Street finance lawyer before deciding the work wasn’t meaningful enough. He now served as a voluntary chaplain to hundreds on death row and another 1,500 in solitary confinement. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but it had given him peace.

The headlines are disturbingly familiar: A person, usually male and often black, who has spent a substantial stretch of his life behind bars is freed after DNA evidence shows that he is innocent.
That was the case for Horace Roberts, 60, who was released from a California prison on Oct. 3 after DNA evidence exonerated him in the 1998 killing of his former girlfriend and co-worker.

Thirty-six years and ten days, that’s how long Rodney Lincoln was in prison before his sentence was commuted for a crime he still says he never committed.

Johnny Edward Tall Bear, a member of the Iowa Nation tribe, has been exonerated by DNA evidence after spending 26 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit – thanks to DNA evidence and help from the Innocence Project. Tall Bear, whose tribal name Pahoo means “brave warrior”, was convicted of murder in 1992 and sentenced to a life without parole. A Court of Criminal Appeals later raised the sentence to life imprisonment.