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New York: Prosecutor Assembling Panel to Review Infamous Child Molestation Case |
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Tuesday, 17 August 2010 01:50 |
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FRANK ELTMAN Associated Press Writer GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) — A prosecutor said Tuesday she will select a group of law-enforcement, legal and social science experts to help her investigators review a notorious child molestation case from the 1980s, although a defense attorney says he prefers the involvement of an independent prosecutor. Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice's announcement comes a day after a federal appeals court criticized police, prosecutors and the judge who handled the case against Arnold and Jesse Friedman.
A teenage Friedman and his father pleaded guilty in 1988 to molesting 13 children during computer classes in the basement of their home in Great Neck, on Long Island. Jesse Friedman has long contended he was coerced into making the guilty plea and the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals said Monday there is good cause to believe that might be true.
"The record here suggests 'a reasonable likelihood' that Jesse Friedman was wrongfully convicted," the judges said in a ruling rejecting Friedman's appeal on technical grounds. The judges noted that "the police, prosecutors and the judge did everything they could to coerce a guilty plea and avoid a trial." |
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Texas: DNA test may cast doubt on executed Texan's guilt; it won't change minds of victim's family |
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Sunday, 15 August 2010 02:03 |
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JEFF CARLTON Associated Press Writer POINT BLANK, Texas (AP) — Claude Jones may have been wrongly executed for the 1989 slaying of a liquor store owner in this aptly named Texas town, but no one says he's an angel. He was a lifelong criminal, with a rap sheet that included a murder conviction for setting fire to a fellow inmate in a Kansas prison. Two eyewitnesses and his accomplices placed him at the liquor store. And even one of Jones' attorneys says the defense had "a devil of a time finding a good character witness."
But there are new questions 10 years after Jones was executed about whether he actually killed 44-year-old Allen Hilzendager while robbing the store, and whether the testimony used to convict him was enough. A judge has ordered DNA testing on a strand of hair that prosecutors used to link Jones to the murder.
It's the second time in a year the guilt of an executed Texas inmate is in doubt. A fire expert last year said the investigation of the fire that killed Cameron Todd Willingham's three daughters was so flawed that the arson finding can't be supported. Willingham was executed in 2004. Last month, a state panel concluded that arson investigators were not negligent.
"He was no poster boy, Claude," said Jerald Crow, Jones' trial attorney. "But that doesn't matter. The law is the law, and they need to follow it." |
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Texas: Cleared and Pondering the Value of 27 Years |
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Thursday, 12 August 2010 01:03 |
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HOUSTON — Since a judge let him out of prison for a rape that prosecutors now say he did not commit, Michael A. Green has had trouble sleeping. Late at night, he walks the neat, quiet sidewalks in the neighborhood where he is staying with an aunt, chain-smoking cigarettes, his mind spinning furiously with questions about why he was convicted 27 years ago and how to spend what is left of his life. He also ponders, he says, whether to take a $2.2 million compensation payment from the State of Texas or file a civil lawsuit in the hope of exposing the truth about the investigation that led to his incarceration. To receive the compensation, he must waive the right to sue. “What I really need to do is to make them pay for what they done to me,” he says. “Two-point-two million dollars is nothing when it comes to 27 years of my life, which I spent with mental torture and physical abuse.” |
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Illinois: The day Jerry Hobbs wrongfully admitted killing his daughter and her friend |
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Friday, 06 August 2010 02:35 |
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By Dan Hinkel, Tribune reporter It was just before 5 a.m., about 21 hours after police had started questioning him, when Jerry Hobbs spoke the words that triggered events that sent him to jail for five years and three months. Detectives in the small, windowless room had just told Hobbs they were positive he had murdered his daughter Laura, 8, and her friend Krystal Tobias, 9 — a conclusion Hobbs steadfastly denied over the previous hours, according to the officers' court testimony. A police officer testified that when Hobbs was told he could soothe the grieving families' anguish if he explained why he killed the girls, Hobbs spoke up.
"I did it. Just write it down. Start this thing and send me to the judge," Hobbs said, according to police testimony.
In facing his own tough questioning last week about why authorities pursued their case against Hobbs and held him for five years before dropping charges on Wednesday, Lake County State's Attorney Michael Waller repeatedly pointed to the officers' testimony about Hobbs' confession.
Now, that confession — which Hobbs recanted and his lawyers said was coerced — is one focus of Hobbs' newly retained civil attorney |
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New York: Staying Behind Bars on a Claim of Innocence |
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Wednesday, 21 July 2010 19:38 |
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July 9, 2010 By JIM DWYER He is either innocent or a madman. Whichever one he is, Everton Wagstaffe will not go quietly. Locked up nearly 19 years for a crime that he says he did not do, Mr. Wagstaffe could have gotten out of prison long ago by expressing remorse for being involved in the killing of a teenage girl in Brooklyn on New Year’s Day 1992. He and another man, Reginald Connor, were convicted of kidnapping the girl largely on the testimony of a single witness. Instead, in thousands of letters and volumes of legal briefs he wrote himself, Mr. Wagstaffe has declared his innocence. This is free speech with a twist: he can say whatever he wants, as long as he’s willing to stay in prison until 2017. “I would rather die here behind bars than live behind the lie that I had anything to do with this terrible crime,” said Mr. Wagstaffe, 41. |
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California: Wrongly Convicted Man Gets $7.95 MIllion Settlement |
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Saturday, 14 August 2010 00:30 |
By REBECCA CATHCARTLOS ANGELES — A man who spent 24 years imprisoned for a murder he did not commit will receive $7.95 million from the City of Long Beach after he sued the police there for withholding evidence in his 1980 trial. The settlement, made public Thursday, is the largest pretrial settlement ever in California for a wrongful conviction and one of the largest in the country, said Barry Litt, a lawyer for the man, Thomas Lee Goldstein. In 2004, Mr. Goldstein was freed from prison after the Los Angeles district attorney dismissed all charges against him in the 1979 killing of a Long Beach drug dealer. The move was based on new evidence that the police had coached the only witness in the case by pointing Mr. Goldstein out in a photo spread as a suspect who had failed a polygraph test. Lawyers also presented evidence that the police had offered Eddy Fink, a heroin addict and police informant, leniency in a grand theft conviction if he testified against Mr. Goldstein. At the trial, Mr. Fink told the jury that Mr. Goldstein had confessed to the killing when the two men briefly shared a jail cell. Mr. Fink, who has since died, lied in court when asked if he had made any deal with the police before testifying, Mr. Litt said. But Monte Machit, the Long Beach deputy attorney who defended the city in the case, said the police had not provided Mr. Fink “with any benefit in exchange for the information he offered.” “We don’t believe there was any wrongdoing” by city officials, Mr. Machit said. “This is a lot of money, but in light of the potential verdict,” which could have been $24 million to $30 million and lawyers’ fees, he said, “we thought it better to get it resolved.” Mr. Goldstein, 61, said the settlement was the end of a 30-year-long “painful chapter” in his life. He said he would spend his coming years trying to “rebuild my life, prepare for retirement and help others who have not been as fortunate as I am today.” |
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Ohio: Unusual ALliance Protests Execution |
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Tuesday, 10 August 2010 01:34 |
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By BOB DRIEHAUSCINCINNATI — An unlikely array of Republicans and Democrats, attorneys general and federal and state judges and prosecutors has lined up to fight the execution of a death row inmate many believe to be innocent. Dozens of former officials have joined death penalty opponents to appeal to Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, a Democrat, to spare the life of the inmate, Kevin Keith. They say emerging evidence of investigative errors, inadequate defense and the existence of another suspect merit a pardon or at least a new trial. The diverse group, including some who generally support the death penalty, is scheduled to appear at a news conference at the Statehouse in Columbus on Tuesday, ahead of a clemency hearing on Wednesday. Mr. Keith, 46, was convicted of murdering two women and a 4-year-old girl and wounding a man and two children in February 1994. Prosecutors said he sprayed gunfire through an apartment in Bucyrus, Ohio, to retaliate against a relative of some of the victims who cooperated with a drug raid. Mr. Keith is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Sept. 15. But many believe he did not commit the crime. |
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Texas: DNA Clears Houston Man 27 Years After Conviction |
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Thursday, 29 July 2010 01:20 |
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A Houston man is expected to be freed this week after serving more than 27 years in prison — the longest time behind bars of any Texan who has been exonerated - for a rape prosecutors now say he did not commit. Michael Anthony Green, 45, is expected to be in court today, when his attorney, Bob Wicoff, will ask that he be released on bail while the case moves forward. If freed, Green would be the eighth local man let out of prison in recent years, and the second in a week, after serving time for a crime he did not commit. "He is innocent," Wicoff said. "We've got the bad guys, too. We've pegged the bad guys." Green was sentenced to 75 years in prison for the 1983 rape of a Houston woman based on faulty eyewitness identification, Wicoff said. |
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North Carolina: Innocent Hot Springs Man Set Free from Prison, 17 Years Late |
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Saturday, 17 July 2010 01:48 |
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| By Jonathan Austin Jonathan “Scott” Pierpoint walked out of prison Wednesday, hugged the lawyer who helped set him free and marveled at using a cell phone for the first time. He then headed for a coffeehouse to eat something other than the prison food he endured for 17 years. At 46 years old, the Hot Springs man won release from a life sentence after being wrongfully convicted in 1992 of sexually abusing his stepson. Tuesday in Avery County Superior Court, Judge C. Philip Ginn wrote that the stepson's statements and new medical evidence made it clear the Hot Springs man should never have been imprisoned. In the order releasing Pierpoint, Ginn said “In light of the new evidence, no reasonable juror would have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
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