(The total is now 3,464.) And they lose more years of their lives - 10.1 years vs. population but 54% of the 3,433 exonerations studied. The group’s data show the disproportionate harm that botched prosecutions cause Black defendants like Wright. There was a DNA exclusion, and they said they were going to try it anyway,” said Maurice Possley, a senior researcher at the exonerations registry. Wright, 53, settled a lawsuit against the city for nearly $10 million. The only officer sent to prison had testified against his colleagues. And an FBI racketeering case against Philadelphia’s narcotics unit, which alleged members routinely robbed drug dealers and lied about it, ended with a 2015 jury acquittal. Last year, a mistake by prosecutors sank a police perjury case in Manhattan, when a judge halted the trial over their failure to turn over evidence to the defense. “It’s an incredibly hard burden to meet,” said Bluestine, now assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania. Marissa Bluestine, the former director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, said testimony needs to be intentionally deceitful, not just mistakenly so, to convict someone of perjury. There’s also a high legal bar for proving perjury. Tauber, a Philadelphia defense lawyer who has helped free three men from prison after wrongful convictions. “We’re willing to accept remediation of the harm, but we’re not prepared to accept accountability of the culpable,” said Alan J. Meanwhile, public agencies across the country have paid out $4 billion to compensate people for the nine years, on average, they wrongly spent in prison, according to The National Registry of Exonerations. They are all now in their mid- to late 70s and maintain their innocence.Įxperts in the exoneration community can cite just a handful of similar efforts to charge police or prosecutors in their cases. Jastrzembski is accused of lying about finding the victim’s clothes in Wright’s bedroom. Santiago and Jastrzembski are accused of lying when they testified they didn’t know about the DNA problem. Santiago and Devlin are accused of lying about the confession. He charged the Wright detectives in 2021, days before the five-year deadline expired. He has championed 40 exonerations to date, and pursued a small number of police perjury cases, often over active investigations. That trial testimony was still fair game when Krasner, a civil rights lawyer focused on criminal justice reform, took office in 2018.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |