Although the justice system is designed to err on the side of caution, the system is not perfect. That means that for every load of court cases that produce correct verdicts, there is a case which deems an innocent person guilty. It’s a high cost to pay for those who find their lives and futures victimized by bad lawyering, evidence tampering, false testimony or misled jurors.
Studies have reported that between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of all prisoners are innocent and The Innocence Project has made restoring the lives of the wrongly accused its business. The national litigation and public policy organization uses DNA testing to re-open the cases of prisoners who stand by their innocence. To date, they’ve had hundreds of successes. According to their website, there have been 261 post-conviction DNA exonerations in United States history.
We turned to the Innocence Project to discover some of the more notable exoneration cases of African Americans in 2010. The following 5 stories represent resilience on the part of the victims and the hope provided by organizations like The Innocence Project in strengthening the justice system.
Raymond Towler
Conviction: Rape, two counts felonious assault, two counts kidnapping
Year of Conviction: 1981
Exoneration Date: 5/5/10
Sentence Served: 28.5 Years. He walked into prison as a 24-year-old and walked out at the age of 52.
Contributing Causes: Eyewitness Mis-identification
On May 24, 1981, an 11-year-old girl and her 12-year-old male cousin were walking their bikes in a Cleveland park when they were lured into a wooded area by a man, who reportedly pulled a gun and assaulted the boy, forcing him to lie on the ground while he raped and sexually assaulted the young girl. About three weeks after the crime, Raymond Towler was stopped by a park ranger near the same Cleveland park for running a stop sign in his car. The ranger noticed that Towler resembled the composite sketch of the rapist and apprehended him.
Several days later, both victims chose Towler from a photo array, although it took the boy nearly 10 minutes to choose his photo, and the girl nearly 15 minutes. Two other witnesses who saw the perpetrator in the park that day also chose Towler’s photo from an array. Based on these identifications, Towler was charged with rape, assault and kidnapping.
The only physical evidence presented at Towler’s trial came from a forensic analyst who had microscopically examined a hair combed from the victim. He testified that the hair appeared to be a pubic hair and was a “negro” hair. The female victim was white. The analyst said, however, that the hair did not possess a sufficient number of unique individual characteristics to be linked to Towler.
Towler also had an alibi; he was home at the time of the crime. Several witnesses corroborated his alibi.
In May 2010, the female victim’s underwear was tested using a new technology called Y-STR. The results excluded Towler as the perpetrator and he was released days later.
Maurice Patterson
Conviction: First-degree murder
Year of Conviction: 2003
Exoneration Date: 10/8/10
Sentence Served: 8 Years
Contributing Causes: Eyewitness Misidentification
Patterson was accused of fatally stabbing a man in Chicago in 2002. Three people who claimed to have seen the attack identified Patterson as the killer several weeks after the incident. Crucial evidence was prevented from entering into the trial: that the victim’s blood and the blood of another suspect were on a knife found near the scene of the crime and Patterson’s DNA was not indeed on the knife. Crime lab reports showed that Cook County prosecutors and Chicago police incorrectly declared that blood from the victim was not on the knife. After DNA evidence was introduced, confirming Patterson’s story, Patterson was freed in October 2010 after eight years in prison.
Anthony Johnson
Conviction: Second degree murder
Year of Conviction: 1986
Exoneration Date: 9/15/10
Sentence Served: 22 Years
Contributing Causes: False Confessions / Admissions, Bad Lawyering
Anthony Johnson was convicted in 1986 of sexually assaulting his girlfriend and stabbing her to death at her Louisiana home. He served 22 years in prison before DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project New Orleans cleared him. He was freed in 2007, but his exoneration didn’t become official until further DNA tests implicated the real perpetrator in 2010.
Shortly after the body of his girlfriend, who was also the mother of his child, was found, police quickly arrested Johnson. The jury considered weak evidence like the fact that Johnson was near the scene of the crime (his girlfriend’s residence) near the time of the crime and that his hairs were found at her residence. All circumstantial evidence considering he was in a relationship with the victim.
In addition, a police officer claimed that Mr. Johnson gave a statement in which he gave information about the murder that could only have been known by the killer. However, there was no recording of the interview and the investigator who allegedly took the statement gave inconsistent information under oath as to why the statement was not recorded.
DNA testing excluded him in 2006. His conviction was reversed and he was released in 2007 based upon the results of the DNA testing and based on a finding by the court that the State had withheld “crucial exculpatory evidence” from the defense, including information that a serial killer had been boasting about committing the murder of Ms. Bonds. When the State investigated and compared the DNA found under Bond’s fingernails to the serial killer, it matched. Anthony Johnson was officially exonerated on September 15, 2010.
Michael Anthony Green
Michael Anthony Green holding a picture of his mom who past away while he was imprisoned.
Conviction: Aggravated rape
Year of Conviction: 1983
Exoneration Date: 10/20/10
Sentence Served: 27 Years
Contributing Causes: Eyewitness Misidentification
Michael Green was sentenced to 75 years in prison for the 1983 rape of a Houston woman based on faulty eyewitness identification. In April of 1983, a woman talking on a pay phone was abducted at gunpoint by several men at a gas station. The men drove her to a secluded area where three of the four men raped her.
According to the Houston Chronicle:
Green was picked up the night of the assault by officers looking for a stolen black car in the area where the woman was raped. According to court records, when police spotted the car and pulled it over, the four black men inside fled. Police began stopping all black men walking in the area and detained Green, who is black.
Green and another man were left in a police car that night, illuminated by headlights, while the victim was brought to the scene. Court records say the woman saw both men but said neither was among those who had assaulted her.
Eight days later, however, police showed the victim a photo array that included Green, and she picked him out. Later that day, she picked him out of a live lineup.
The victim identified him in court four months later, after having seen him three times. He was the only person convicted of the crime, according the District Attorney’s Office.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office found a pair of jeans stored in a warehouse that had been worn by the victim during the crime and tested it for DNA evidence – the results excluded Green in June 2010. Two other men matched DNA that had been recorded in the national DNA database. A third man’s DNA also was found.
Through interviews with the two suspects, investigators were led to two more men. Test results returned this week showed that one of those two, not Green, was the third man involved in the sexual assault. One of the suspects admitted he was there and said Green was not.
He was officially exonerated on October 20, 2010
Shawn Massey
Conviction: Second degree kidnapping, felonious breaking and entering and robbery
Year of Conviction: 1998
Exoneration Date: May 6, 2010
Sentence Served: 12 Years;entered at the age of 25, released at the age of 37
Contributing Causes: Eyewitness Misidentification
Massey was assisted by Duke Law School’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic in overturning his 1998 conviction of second degree kidnapping, felonious breaking and entering and robbery. He served 12 years.
According to IndyWeek:
Massey was convicted of forcing Samantha Wood and her two young children into their Charlotte apartment at gunpoint and robbing Wood on May 22, 1998. Woods described her attacker as a 5-foot-9, 180-pound black male with cornrows. His conviction was largely based on photo identification by Woods, when she wrote under his photograph that he looked like the suspect, “except for the braids.”
Massey was never visited by detectives on the case. Nor did Woods and Massey have a face-to-face encounter until the trial nearly one year later. That’s when Woods remarked that Massey appeared smaller than her attacker and did not have braids, although she remained confident that he committed the crime. A jury convicted him and he was sentenced to a minimum of 11 and a half years.
The cornrows ended up being key to Massey’s emancipation. The Duke law school students working on the case consulted barbers with hair braiding experience and “confirmed it was impossible that Massey’s hair could have grown long enough in 11 weeks to be braided into cornrows.”
