now you can feel it a tiny tiny bit .. seriously connected .. we are .. :) .. these are the experiences which we have to help us feel better about our world ..
#Losttime This Wrongly Convicted Man Spent 25 Thanksgivings in Prison
2016 - "Death Penalty: Nicholas Yarris spent 22 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit "
This holiday, he says he’s thankful. Are you?
By Charles M. Blow Opinion Columnist
Nov. 25, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ET
Barry Williams
In 1995, I was a 25-year-old Brooklyn father of a one-and-a-half-year-old son. I had recently joined The Times and had become the paper’s youngest newsroom department head since a man named Lester Markel was named Sunday editor in 1923.
In 1995, Christian Pacheco was a 18-year-old Brooklyn father of a one-and-a-half-year-old son. He had recently joined the Latin Kings street gangs and become the second youngest co-defendant in a murder case.
Pacheco and some friends, including a young woman that he was seeing, were at a small, corner lounge in the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, when a bump on the dance floor quickly escalated into a brawl in which the victim was stabbed and his throat slit.
One witness testified that Pacheco was the person who slit the man’s throat. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.
Pacheco insisted that he was innocent. Although he had fought another man earlier in the altercation, he had not stabbed the victim nor slit his throat. He contends that he knew the victim, came to his rescue, and as a result was stabbed several times himself for doing so.
Still, it wasn’t until this year that Pacheco’s conviction was overturned .. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5680 .. after newly discovered information proved that he did not receive a fair trial and that the testimony of the witness who said that Pacheco did the killing was “most probably false.”
I spoke to Pacheco this week. He told me what he recalled about that moment, years ago, when the judge read the verdict and he learned that he’d go to prison:
“Honestly, I don’t remember much, but I remember saying to myself, I said uh, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe this.’ You know, and I was shocked.”
He continued:
“And then I turned around. I looked at my son’s mom. She had the baby there. And she was there with her mother. And all I remember seeing was my son’s mom, um, getting up from the seat where she was sitting, crying, and walking away from the courtroom.”
I spent the Thanksgiving of Pacheco’s conviction year in the largest apartment I would ever occupy in New York: A rambling four-bedroom unit in Prospect Heights, which I rented from a colleague who was moving away to take another assignment, but was having a hard time selling the place in the wake of the Savings and Loan Crisis. There were so many rooms that some we just left empty.
Pacheco would spend his first prison Thanksgiving occupying a 6-by-9-foot prison cell. He was still just a teenager. He was still in shock that he had been convicted. As he said: “I’m missing my family, especially my son, you know, and my mother.” He stresses, “I left a baby behind, and that was the one that was killing me inside: that I left the mother of my child with my child, out there,” knowing, as he says, that he had nothing to do with the killing.
He was allowed just 10 minutes to scarf down a special “facility meal” for Thanksgiving. But, as Pacheco said, mustering a laugh, “But, believe me, it’s nowhere near the Thanksgiving you would have out here.”
Over the years, he learned to cope with the loneliness and sadness of incarcerated holidays the best way he knew how. For Thanksgiving he would decorate his cell with pictures of turkeys he cut from magazines and hang up pictures of his family.
Sometimes, one of the inmates who could cook would make a special meal. One year Pacheco says that his cellmate made a special meal of instant rice, squid or calamari and spices bought from the commissary, placed in a clear garbage bag and heated on the cell’s hotpot.
I spent all those years surrounded by friends and family and eating like a glutton.
(Indeed, four years after Pacheco’s conviction, I moved just six blocks away from where the murder had occurred and stayed there almost the entire time Pacheco was in prison.)
Pacheco said that he learned through his lawyers twice, sometime in 2007 or 2008, that the prosecution would hand him a plea deal if he would plead guilty to a lesser charge. They would consider the time he’d already spent in prison as time served, and he could go home. Both times he refused. As he told me: “I told the attorney at that time, I said, ‘No, I’m not doing that because they know that I didn’t do this.’ ”
When we spoke this week, Pacheco told me about what he recalled about the moment this year when the judge read the ruling that freed him. “All I remember was looking back, and I saw my grandma and my mother tearing, you know. And, I just kept looking at them,” he said, adding, “I remember a few tears came down my own eyes.”
That is not to say this is the end of things. The Conviction Review Unit still asserts that there was “strong direct and circumstantial evidence” that Pacheco was involved in the incident and that he was “not factually innocent.” Pacheco says that he is still fighting to fully clear his name and has filled a $100 million lawsuit .. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wrongful-conviction-christian-pacheco-man-wrongfully-convicted-of-murder-sues-new-york/ .. against New York State for unjust conviction and imprisonment.
Our sons are now both 26, his in the Navy and mine in medical school. As I talked to him all I could think of was all the memories I have of my son over those years, watching him grow up, and all those same opportunities for memories that were stolen from Pacheco.
This is the first year in my life, because of the pandemic, that I will be forced to be away from family and friends. But I am still thankful and hopeful because I know that this is the first year in 25 years that Pacheco will be able to be with his family and friends.
When people complain about the restrictions that the pandemic has placed on our lives, when some go so far as to claim that it has unfairly stripped us of our rights and liberties, remember that there are people among us whose freedoms have truly been unfairly taken, people who would be happy if their only concerns were having to wear a mask and socially distance.
Pacheco was wrongly convicted, spent 25 Thanksgivings in prison, and he’s still thankful. As he told me:
“I’m thankful just to be home and be free, blessed to be able to do that with my family and my loved ones. And, when I say loved ones, I mean family and friends alike, you know what I mean. So, I am thankful for that. And, I give thanks to the most high, which is God, you know, and that he was able to make this happen. It doesn’t matter if it’s 25 years, 30 years, five years. What matters is that I’m out here now.”
Pacheco is now living with the woman he was seeing the night of the killing, the night that he himself was stabbed in the scrum, and they will spend Thanksgiving together.
"The system is broken." "All you can control in life is how you respond to life." "I know the system doesn't care about me."
Related: Meanwhile - Innocence Is Irrelevant "Comparing presidential administrations by arrests and convictions: A warning for Trump appointees" This is the age of the plea bargain—and millions of Americans are suffering the consequences. 2019 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152459277
Former death row couple: 'Life turned out beautifully' .. except for the tragedy of Jesse, these results are great to see .. sure beats war .. Sunny Jacobs and Peter Pringle are a happy couple with a rare common bond. Each spent more than 15 years on death row for murder – she in the US, he in Ireland – before being found innocent and given back their freedom 2013 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91426495
[...]Fire investigation Louis C. Taylor was released in 2013 through a plea agreement after serving 42 years. Dave Mann of the Texas Observer became interested in the study of errors in fire investigation as a result of the cases of Ernest Ray Willis (who was exonerated after 17 years on death row) and Cameron Todd Willingham (who was executed after 12). He published a study that included a count of total fires in Texas versus the number of fires determined to be arson. Those results demonstrate a more than 60% drop in the number of fires determined to be arson between 1997 and 2007. 2014 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=101580267
Standing with Justin Brooks, Brian Banks arrives at the California Western School of Law to thank the California Innocence Project for getting his conviction exonerated on May 25, 2012. (Nelvin C. Cepeda/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Cal Western says it has paused the program until the arrival of a newly hired director, who teaches at the University of Alabama and starts the job in July
By Teri Figueroa Dec. 2, 2023 5 AM PT
SAN DIEGO —
The acclaimed California Innocence Project shut it doors this week, taking a hiatus until its newly hired director steps into the job next summer — a pause that came as a surprise, given the group’s high-profile work exonerating people who have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes.
California Western School of Law shared news of the temporary stop-down Thursday while announcing it has hired a new director, a law professor at the University of Alabama and former San Diegan, to take over the program starting July 1.
A school spokesperson said the project was representing fewer than 15 clients, and all have been transferred to attorneys who will represent them. Hundreds of people reach out to the organization each year asking its attorneys to take their cases. Cal Western spokesperson Catherine Spray said it will refer such inquiries to “alternative innocence projects in Southern California.”
The California Innocence Project has freed 40 people since it was founded in 1999, including one-time NFL hopeful Brian Banks, a former high school football star who was falsely accused of rape. His story later became a movie, with actor Greg Kinnear playing Justin Brooks, who co-founded and co-directed the California Innocence Project.
It’s been a year of change for the California Innocence Project. Brooks stepped down from his long-held leadership there in May and resigned his tenured faculty position. He has since joined the faculty at the University of San Diego’s School of Law, where he will lead programs aimed at training law students, professors and lawyers in Latin America, and Mexico in particular.
Brooks declined comment on the pause Friday. On Thursday, he posted a message on X (formerly known as Twitter), saying “After 24 years of great work the operation was shut down yesterday. Tragic.”
With Brooks’ departure, attorney Alissa Bjerkhoel was tapped as the interim director of the California Innocence Project. But she also left, after Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed her as a superior court judge in California’s Nevada County.
Asked why the law school paused the program rather than bringing in another interim leader through the spring, Spray pointed to the timing and a requirement from the American Bar Association that faculty members lead such legal clinics.
“The cycle for hiring a faculty member has ended for this academic year, and thus it is extremely difficult to find an interim director with post-conviction experience, and experience managing a clinic and teaching law students on such short notice,” Spray said.
She said none of the staff attorneys volunteered to take the interim job.
Timothy Atkins, left, who was freed from prison after 20 years, eats pizza with the staff of the California Innocence Project in their offices at Cal Western School of Law on April 13, 2007. (John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Project co-founder Jan Stiglitz left the organization a few years ago, but he remains an emeritus professor with Cal Western. He called the development “the end of an era.”
He said part of the work is to look into the hundreds of inquires the project receives each year, with an eye toward viable cases. “For the foreseeable future, they’ve got no one really doing anything,” Stiglitz said.
He said staff attorneys have left the program. The school said the project had no interns on hand this fall.
The new director headed to the California Innocence Project is Amy Kimpel, an associate professor and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at the University of Alabama. Part of her job at the clinic there involved work on cases of people who had already been convicted of a crime.
In the news release Thursday announcing her hiring, Cal Western President and Dean Sean Scott said Kimpel “will be a wonderful addition to our faculty, as well as a highly qualified and experienced Director of the CIP.”
Kimpel once worked for the Federal Defenders of San Diego, which handles criminal defense cases for indigent clients in federal court, and also worked for the Santa Clara County Office of the Public Defender in San Jose, according to Cal Western.
“We are excited to anticipate Professor Kimpel’s arrival and having her write the next chapter for the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law,” Scott said.
Earlier this year, Brooks said that when he and Stiglitz co-founded the California Innocence Project, there were only a handful of people doing that kind of work across the country. But last year, he went to an innocence conference in Phoenix that drew more than 1,100 attendees.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
