Dewey Bozella in Philadelphia before his fight Saturday in Los Angeles against Larry Hopkins, 30. The purse will be in the low four figures. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Mr. Bozella, center, with his trainers at Joe Hand Boxing Gym in Philadelphia. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Dewey Bozella failed California's boxing test in August. After training, he passed in September. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME Published: October 10, 2011
PHILADELPHIA — The television crew had him up at dawn doing the Rocky fandango, dashing up the 72 stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and dancing around in triumph like another over-the-hill, underdog pugilist who had made it big.
Cliché or not, it is hard not to imagine the familiar trumpet score along with the thwock, thwock, thwock of fists on punching bags as Dewey Bozella trains for one of the least likely boxing matches in history.
After 26 years in New York State prisons, and two years after he was exonerated of murder, Mr. Bozella will make his professional boxing debut on Saturday in Los Angeles, at age 52, on the undercard of the light-heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins. (A mere 46 himself, Mr. Hopkins became the oldest fighter to win a major world championship this May.)
Mr. Bozella’s other fight, in which he is seeking compensation for the half of his life he spent behind bars, may be even more daunting than chasing victory in the ring. But for now, Mr. Bozella is focused on what he says will be his one and only professional bout.
“I want to go out there and give 100 percent and then move on with my life,” he said. “This is not a career move. It’s a personal move and a way to let people know to never give up on their dreams. My favorite quote is ‘Don’t let fear determine who you are and never let where you come from determine where you’re going.’ That’s what this is about.”
The product of a violent broken family and a hard life on the streets, Mr. Bozella was a troubled 18-year-old in 1977 when Emma Crapser, 92, was murdered in her Poughkeepsie, N.Y., home after returning from playing bingo. Six years later, based almost entirely on the testimony of two criminals who repeatedly changed their stories, he was convicted of the murder.
There was no physical evidence implicating Mr. Bozella. Instead, there was the fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood. Mr. Bozella was retried in 1990, and was offered a deal that would let him go free in exchange for an admission that he committed the crime. He refused. A jury convicted him again.
At Sing Sing, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from the New York Theological Seminary. And he boxed in the prison’s “Death House,” once the scene of electrocutions, then a boxing ring, where he became Sing Sing’s light-heavyweight champion. At parole hearings, he repeatedly refused to express remorse for the crime he did not commit. He would get out one way, he said, either in a box or as an exonerated man. The box seemed more likely.
In the end, he was saved by a miracle. The Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, believing in his case but unable to pursue it absent DNA evidence, referred it to the law firm WilmerHale. Lawyers there eventually found the Poughkeepsie police lieutenant who had investigated the case. He had retired, and Mr. Bozella’s was the only file he had saved. It included numerous pieces of evidence favorable to Mr. Bozella that had not been turned over to his lawyers. On Oct. 28, 2009, he walked out of the courthouse in Poughkeepsie finally a free man [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/nyregion/29towns.html ].
He struggled to find work, eventually counseling former convicts while teaching boxing at a Newburgh, N.Y., gym until ESPN became interested in his story. In July, at its annual ESPY Awards, he was given its Arthur Ashe Courage Award [ http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:6767676 ], whose past recipients have included Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman and Nelson Mandela. The offer to box professionally came as a result of that appearance.
But when he took the rigorous California State Athletic Commission test on Aug. 24 to get licensed to box in the state, he failed. After Labor Day, he began working out in Philadelphia with the trainers for Mr. Hopkins. They were skeptical.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to kill this old guy,’ ” said Danny Davis, one of Mr. Hopkins’s trainers. “There’s no way this guy can make it through my training.”
But Mr. Bozella got tougher, leaner and more nimble, dropping 10 pounds in little more than a week. He sparred with, and took serious lumps from, a world-class fighter: Lajuan Simon, a middleweight title contender. Mr. Bozella took the test again on Sept. 29. This time he passed.
Officials said Mr. Bozella was believed to be the oldest fighter ever licensed to box in California. Fighters that age are extremely rare but hardly unknown. “The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists,” by Bert Randolph Sugar and Teddy Atlas, has a section on “Boxing’s Greatest Methuselahs” that includes Mr. Hopkins; Jem Mace, the legendary 19th-century English boxer who fought at 59; and Saoul Mamby, a former junior welterweight titleholder who fought in 2008 at the age of 60, making him the oldest fighter ever to appear in an officially sanctioned bout.
Mr. Bozella, a cruiserweight — between light-heavyweights and heavyweights — will not be fighting for a championship; he is taking on Larry Hopkins, 30, of Houston, who is 0-3 as a professional (and is not related to Bernard Hopkins). His purse in the pay-per-view bout will be in the very low four figures.
But even if hype and marketing are as much a part of boxing as quick feet and sharp jabs, Mr. Bozella said the bout was anything but a stunt.
“You’ve seen the workout I went through, the pain, blood and bruises I’m getting,” he said after four rounds sparring with Mr. Simon last week. “No one’s giving me nothing for free. I can go out there and get knocked out, or I can knock the other guy out. It’s that simple.”
Mr. Bozella hopes to open his own gym as a way to mentor youngsters, but beyond its Hollywood touches, his feel-good story turns cloudier. The day after he passed the boxing test, a federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Dutchess County and the City of Poughkeepsie over the evidence that was not turned over to his lawyers.
The decision was primarily based on a controversial Supreme Court ruling in the case of Connick v. Thompson [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61662823 ; http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61900715 ]. By a 5-to-4 margin, the court, in a decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas in March, threw out a $14 million jury award to a former death row inmate freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light. The decision stated that only a pattern of misconduct in properly turning over evidence could warrant financial compensation, no matter how egregious the misconduct against a single defendant.
“I’m not going to disrespect the courts,” Mr. Bozella said. “I’d just like the justice system to be fair. Same thing with boxing. If the judges are fair, then the real winner wins. Just be fair. That’s it.”
Another Death Row Debacle: The Case Against Thomas Arthur
In Alabama, a death row prisoner could be exonerated by a DNA test. Why are the courts preventing this from happening -- especially when another man has already confessed to the crime?
Andrew Cohen Feb 27 2012, 12:28 PM ET
Another month, another man on death row, another excruciating case that illustrates just some of the ways in which America's death penalty regime is unconstitutionally broken. This time, the venue is Alabama. This time, the murder that generated the sentence took place 30 years ago. And this time, there is an execution date of March 29, 2012, for Thomas Arthur [ http://www.thomasarthurfightforlife.com/ ], a man who has always maintained his innocence. He also has the unwelcome distinction of being one of the few prisoners in the DNA-testing era to be this close to capital punishment after someone else confessed under oath to the crime.
Late last month, I profiled [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/is-ohio-keeping-another-innocent-man-on-death-row/252126/?single_page=true ] the wobbly capital conviction against Troy Noling in Ohio and there are remarkable similarities between it and the Arthur case. Both involve white defendants. Both include contentions of innocence and allegations of bad lawyering at trial. Both include a lack of physical evidence linking the defendants to the crime. Both include crucial witness testimony that borders the farcical. And both include state officials reluctant to permit sophisticated DNA testing that might definitively answer questions about whether the defendants committed the murders they will die for.
Arthur's attorneys are even willing to pay for that testing, the few thousand bucks it would be, and the testing could be completed by the execution date. It is here where prosecutors and judges lose me when they prioritize "finality" in capital punishment cases at the expense of "accuracy." It would cost Alabama nothing to let Arthur's lawyers do the testing. And it might solve a case that already has cost the state millions of dollars. Instead, Alabama wants to finally solve its Arthur problem by executing him. No matter how the new DNA test could come out, the state is more interested in defending its dubious conviction.
THE TRIALS OF THOMAS ARTHUR
Thomas Arthur / AP
Apart from the fact that he may have spent decades on death row for a crime he didn't commit -- based upon the testimony of a convicted murderer with a motive to lie -- Arthur isn't exactly a sympathetic figure. In 1986, while awaiting his second trial, he escaped from jail by shooting one of his guards. But any reasonable person looking at the tortuous history of his case through the decades [ http://www.thomasarthurfightforlife.com/linkstomotionsfiled.html ] would see that there is something wrong here. Three times Alabama tried Arthur for murdering Troy Wicker on February 1, 1982. Three times the state got a conviction and death penalty against him. Three times there were problems at trial.
Some of this has been litigated -- over and over again [ http://lethal-injection-florida.blogspot.com/2007/11/case-of-thomas-arthur.html ] -- at both the state and federal level (the back story alone raises important constitutional concerns). What's important today, however, is that Alabama now seems to have based its entire case against Arthur upon the testimony of Judy Wicker, Troy's wife, who said at the time of the murder that she had been raped by a stranger. Over and over again state investigators asked her if Thomas Arthur was involved in the crime. And over and over again she said no. So what happened?
What happened was that Judy Wicker was lying [ http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1217405743196090.xml&coll=2 ]. Turns out she had hired someone to murder her husband -- and got caught doing so! Several months after her husband's death, Wicker was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. A few years later, however, she cut a deal with prosecutors. In exchange for a recommended early release from prison, she would change her testimony and accuse Arthur of the crime. And that's what happened. Wicker's testimony secured Arthur's third and final conviction. And this time, for over 20 years now, all of the state and federal courts that have reviewed the case have endorsed that result.
THE "OTHER MAN"
Were this all to the story it would be bad enough. But in 2008 things got worse. A man named Bobby Ray Gilbert confessed under oath to murdering Troy Wicker. In a sworn affidavit, Gilbert said he started an affair with Judy Wicker after they met at a bar and soon agreed that he would kill Troy Wicker, whom Judy Wicker claimed was an "abusive" husband. They agreed, Gilbert said decades later on paper, that he would wear an "Afro wig" and dark make-up as a disguise. After he shot Troy Wicker, Gilbert wrote, he and Judy Wicker had unprotected sex, after which she asked Gilbert to "beat her up" so it would look like rape.
Citing Gilbert's detailed affidavit, here's how Arthur's pro bono lawyers, who work at the venerable law firm Sullivan & Cromwell [ http://www.sullcrom.com/hansuhanas/ ], described what happened next: "After the murder, Gilbert drove Wicker's car back to the trade school parking lot to meet his cousin, still wearing the wig and make-up. He left Wicker's car in the parking lot. Police later recovered her car, with an 'Afro wig' inside it, in the parking lot of the Northwest Alabama State Junior College" (citations omitted by me). This is the same wig that Arthur's attorneys want to have DNA tested anew for a link that could scientifically substantiate Gilbert's confession.
Why did Gilbert wait over 25 years to come forward with his story? It's an important question. Arthur's attorneys phrase the answer this way: "Gilbert explained that he did not come forward with his confession earlier because he feared receiving the death penalty, and only confessed after the United States Supreme Court ruled that a minor at the time of the crime could not receive the death penalty." Gilbert is referring here to the Court's March 2005 5-4 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which held that the execution of juvenile murderers -- under 18 when they killed -- violated the "cruel and unusual punishment clause" of the 8th Amendment.
THE HEARING
For Arthur, Gilbert's confession came just in time. The Alabama Supreme Court stayed his 2008 execution date and he was given a hearing and the opportunity to undertake DNA testing on key evidence in the case. Nothing linked Arthur (or Gilbert, for that matter) to any of the evidence tested, but one key item was missing from the original trial list: Judy Wicker's rape kit. Evidently that kit, which might have revealed the critical link between Wicker and Gilbert, had been missing even before Arthur's final (1991) trial. And the wig? Alabama forensic experts found DNA on it but were nevertheless unable to develop a comparative DNA profile.
Predictably, Arthur called Gilbert to testify at the hearing -- to repeat, in essence, in open court, subject to cross examination, what he had sworn to in the affidavit. This time, however, Gilbert chose to exercise his 5th Amendment right to remain silent. Arthur's attorneys say this is because Gilbert was punished by prison officials after his confession to the Wicker murder. Alabama denies that any coercion was used against Gilbert and says that Gilbert said he would recant his confession if he got certain prison privileges back. And Judy Wicker, who had for years exonerated Arthur, did testify at the hearing. She said Gilbert was lying.
The trial judge didn't buy Gilbert's story one bit. In fact, she ruled that Gilbert and Arthur were attempting to "perpetuate a fraud" upon the court. And she ruled that the lack of DNA evidence linking Gilbert to the crime -- it also excluded Arthur, remember -- scientifically proved that Gilbert's confession was false. It is this ruling, the latest of dozens since the Troy Wicker murder, that is still being contested by defense lawyers three years later. They are back. And they want more advanced DNA testing on the wig -- testing they say wasn't available to Alabama in 2008 and 2009.
THE ARGUMENTS
Arthur's lead attorney, Suhana Han, told me Sunday via email: "If new testing developed a DNA profile that matched someone other than Mr. Arthur ... we would consider that evidence that Mr. Arthur didn't wear the wig all parties agree was worn by the perpetrator." Why the new test? Han wrote:
The test we are proposing today (mini-STR DNA typing) may be able to detect a profile where standard autosomal STR typing (the test conducted by the Alabama Dep't of Forensic Sciences in 2009) cannot. Mini-STR DNA typing is a specialized form of autosomal STR typing that can produce a profile when standard autosomal typing fails because the pieces of DNA are too small to be picked up by that system. The mini-STR DNA typing "looks" at a smaller segment of DNA, making it more likely to get a profile out of a degraded sample.
Alabama says, in essence, that after 30 years and several execution dates for Arthur, enough is enough. To the state, the ongoing conspiracy here is not between the two alleged long-ago lovers, Gilbert and Judy Wicker, but between the two fellow inmates, Gilbert and Arthur. "[E]vidence presented at the [2009] hearing established that while Arthur and Gilbert were both incarcerated at Holman Correctional Facility, the two men passed notes to one another so that Gilbert would have enough information about Troy Wicker's murder to confess to it." (And don't forget about that prison guard Arthur shot 25 years ago during his prison escape.)
Alabama says that the failure of Gilbert's credibility alone justified the trial judge's conclusion that Arthur was not entitled to any relief. This meant that the judge wasn't required to order the initial DNA testing and that no courts now should be required to authorize additional testing. The mini-STR DNA testing requested by Arthur's attorneys, Alabama contends, is just as good as the testing performed on the wig a few years ago. And in any event, the state now says that there is no more DNA left to test on the wig after all these years. The time has come, Alabama says, to end Arthur's litigious life on its death row.
WHY IT MATTERS
One day, some enterprising journalist will try to establish how much the state of Alabama spent over the years prosecuting Arthur, imprisoning him, and then defending the conviction and death sentence in his case. The figure must be astounding -- millions upon millions of dollars -- a hard cost of justice. But also an amount that makes ironic, and quite infuriating, the current fight over this last DNA test for this last bit of available evidence. You would think Alabama would be willing to pay just a bit more to perform the test. The fact that Arthur's attorneys are willing to pay for the test makes the state's refusal to test unconscionable.
After all these years, and all these hearings, and all these dramatic developments, you would think that Alabama itself would want to make sure, before it executes Arthur, that there isn't any of Gilbert's DNA on that wig. You would think after losing the rape kit decades ago that state officials would go out of their way to let Arthur's attorneys perform their new test. This is especially so now that an execution date has been set and the testing can be completed before March 29. Prosecutors would say that such testing will only result in new delaying motions from the defense. But it could also reveal the truth.
This is an ugly case, tracking many of the failings of the human condition, and one that raises questions today about long ago testimony. Why were Alabama jurors so willing to believe Judy Wicker? How was Arthur convicted without the rape kit? The case also raises questions about where we go from here on DNA testing. Should a state ever be able to block a new DNA test if it doesn't have to pay for it? The questions from the past tell us how arbitrary and capricious capital cases can be. The questions about the future tell us how much of a fight is left ahead over capital punishment in America.
"On death penalty, confidence does not replace truth
By Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@MiamiHerald.com 2000: Frank Lee Smith is posthumously exonerated — he’d died 11 months earlier — 14 years after being convicted of raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl. The eyewitnesses were wrong.
2001: Charles Fain is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl. The scientific testimony was wrong.
2002: Ray Krone is exonerated and set free 10 years after being sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a bar worker. The scientific testimony was wrong.
2003: John Thompson is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for murder. The prosecutors hid exculpatory scientific evidence and the eyewitnesses were wrong.
2004: Ryan Matthews is exonerated and set free five years after being sentenced to death for killing a convenience store owner. The eyewitnesses were wrong.
2008: Kennedy Brewer is exonerated and set free seven years after being sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter. The scientific testimony was wrong.
2010: Anthony Graves is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for the murder of an entire family. The sole eyewitness —who was himself the murderer — lied.
When you look into it, you soon find that there have been hundreds of cases of death row inmates who, it was later discovered, were actually innocent. In fact, in the United States alone this has happened to more than one hundred different people. Unfortunately, some of these were indeed executed; featured on this list, however, are ten who managed to get exonerated before their sentence was carried out.
10 Levon Junior “Bo” Jones
In 1987, someone robbed and murdered a North Carolina bootlegger named Leamon Grady, in a case we find particularly shocking because we had no idea that bootlegging still existed. Levon Jones was later convicted of the crime .. http://www.ncmoratorium.org/News.aspx?li=2923 , and spent more than a decade on North Carolina’s death row before finally being removed in 2006 and released from prison altogether in 2007. So why did Jones get convicted in the first place? Well, all evidence points to a jilted lover.
Lovely Lorden, a former lover of Jones, had been the star witness: she testified at the original trial that Jones had indeed been the murderer. But she later admitted that she had lied under oath, and had in fact collected $4,000 in reward money for providing clues towards the arrest and conviction. Lorden lacked credibility to the point that a judge went so far as to chastise the defense attorneys who had originally worked on the Jones case, and removed the accused from death row while everything was sorted out. In 2007, the prosecution realized that they simply had no evidence and gave up trying to keep Jones on death row.
9 Glen Chapman
Glen Chapman was sentenced to death in 1994, and spent fifteen years on death row before finally being released. Chapman had been convicted of the murders of Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Yvette Conley.
This was yet another case of the system being so hell-bent on getting a conviction, that the authorities decided to take matters into their own hands .. http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/2669008/ . Chapman was given his new trial when it was discovered that detectives had actually concealed evidence which pointed to his innocence, and that another detective had actually committed perjury while testifying at the trial. Chapman’s defense attorneys were also so bad that the North Carolina State Bar disciplined one, while the other was removed from another death penalty case to get treatment for alcohol abuse.
8 Akabori Masao
We are not sure if there is a more heinous crime than the kidnapping, raping, and murdering of a small child. That’s exactly the crime that Akabori Masao found himself accused of committing—and it’s the crime which, in 1954, he confessed to carrying out. Of course, the fact is that he did not do any of those things, and it turns out that he admitted to them because of police torture. This was enough to get him convicted and sentenced to death anyway, despite his retraction of the confession.
In 1985, Paul House was convicted of raping and murdering his neighbor, Carolyn Muncey—and for the next twenty-two years he lived on death row in Tennessee. Eventually he was released into house arrest after being stricken with multiple sclerosis. In addition to this, new evidence had come to light that threw his guilt into question.
Of course, even after his exoneration in 2009, prosecutors remain unconvinced that he is not guilty of the crime. But multiple DNA tests have been conducted over the years, and none of the samples found under the fingernails of the victim matched House’s DNA. This fact makes it pretty hard to fathom .. http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/13/tennessee.exonerated/ .. how he could possibly have raped Muncey, let alone killed her.
House had been set to be retried when this DNA evidence came to light, but the district attorney finally decided that there was enough reasonable doubt to keep him from being convicted. We’re assuming that he also felt that it would be kind of a jerk move to put a seemingly innocent man with MS back in prison after he’d already spent twenty-two years on death row.
6 John Thompson
In movies about people on death row, the final piece of evidence that will prove the innocence of a wrongfully convicted man always comes to light just before the executioner is about to throw the switch. But that can’t possibly happen in real life, right?
As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly how things panned out for John Thompson .. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/opinion/10thompson.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 .. in 1999. Though the evidence in question did not come to light mere minutes before his execution, it did come out only weeks before he was set to be executed in Louisiana. That’s when it was discovered that prosecutors had withheld evidence which could have cleared Thompson of all charges.
Thompson was arrested for robbery and murder in 1985, and by 1987 he found himself on one of the most infamous death rows in the world, in Angola Prison. He was given six different execution dates over the period he spent on death row, but managed to delay them with appeals until, finally, a seventh execution date was apparently set in stone. But his lawyers had hired a private investigator who somehow managed to pull off a miracle: he found a report withheld by the prosecutors which showed that Thompson’s blood type did not match that of the perpetrator found at the scene of the crime. Because the robbery had been directly tied to the murder, he was taken off of death row. After receiving a new trial in 2003, it took the jury just thirty-five minutes to acquit him of all charges.
5 Ray Krone
We mentioned previously that in the US over one hundred prisoners on death row have been exonerated; Ray Krone has the unique distinction of being the hundredth .. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2003/04/22/8016/ . He was convicted in 1992 of murdering a waitress at a bar in Arizona. To make matters worse, the authorities decided to slap kidnapping and sexual assault charges onto his “resume” as well.
Amazingly, it took the jury only three and a half hours to convict Krone, who had earned the nickname “The Snaggletooth Killer.” But in 2001, a judge ordered a new DNA test on a piece of the victim’s clothing, and it showed that there was no evidence that Krone had been present at the scene of the crime. The DNA did match that of another man, however, who was already in the system. Krone was released in 2002 after the other man—who was already in prison for another sexual assault—admitted to the crime.
4 Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon
So we’ve just told you about the hundredth person released from death row in the US, and now you’re probably wondering about the ninety-ninth, right? Well, Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon was released from Florida’s death row .. http://ccadp.org/juanmelendez.htm .. just three months before Ray Krone—and apart from being the ninety-ninth prisoner in America to be exonerated from a death sentence, he was the twenty-ninth in the state of Florida alone.
Melendez-Colon was convicted of murder in 1983. As it turns out, he was convicted largely based on the testimony of two felons, one of whom was believed to have been coerced and threatened into implicating Melendez-Colon. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, yet the jury found the testimony of the two convicted criminals convincing enough, apparently, to sentence Melendez-Colon to death.
3 Kirk Bloodsworth
Since we’ve already told you about the ninety-ninth and the hundredth men who survived death row in the US, we may as well tell you about the first. Kirk Bloodsworth became the first man to have his death sentence overturned by DNA evidence .. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-14/local/37714138_1_death-penalty-capital-punishment-kirk-bloodsworth . He was first convicted of murder in 1985, and sentenced to death. After the guilty verdict was overturned a year later, he was retried and convicted yet again, shortly afterwards. It wasn’t until 1993 that he was finally granted his freedom.
Bloodsworth had been convicted of the rape and murder of a nine year old girl, and his initial guilty verdict and death sentence were only overturned when it was discovered that prosecutors had withheld crucial evidence from the defense. After his second trial, he was actually given two sentences of life imprisonment rather than being put back on death row—so it seems that there are small victories even when you’ve been wrongfully convicted.
The real murderer was apparently described as being a large, burly man, which also makes it almost laughable when the actual perpetrator turned out to be a mere 5’6”, weighing only 160 pounds (73kg).
2 Gregorio Valero and Leon Sanchez
While most death row exonerations have taken place in more recent years—largely due to the fact that people used to be awfully gung-ho about killing convicted felons—there are a few much earlier cases of innocent men being released from their death sentences. In 1910, for instance, two men in Spain were convicted of murdering a shepherd named Jose Maria Grimaldos Lopez, and prosecuted with the aim of securing the death penalty.
Those two men were Gregorio Valero and Leon Sanchez, and the gross miscarriages of justice that led to their conviction were to become infamous in Spain. Grimaldos Lopez disappeared without a trace in 1910, and despite there being no evidence of foul play, Valero and Sanchez were arrested and charged with murder. When the first trial failed to result in their conviction, the pair were tried again in 1913. This time, Valero and Sanchez were basically beaten into giving their confessions. In 1918 they were sentenced to prison time, though fortunately for them they did manage to narrowly avoid being sentenced to death, despite every effort made by the prosecution to see them killed for this crime they did not commit.
They were later exonerated when Grimaldos Lopez was discovered alive in a nearby town .. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimen_de_Cuenca ; apparently he had been living there the whole time. Oops.
1 Sakae Menda
No one would deny that thirty-four years is a very long time. And every one of those years must feel longer when you’re on death row, waiting for that fateful day when the guards will enter your cell with their heads bowed. Yet that’s exactly what Sakae Menda went through. He spent more than three decades on Japan’s death row for a crime he did not commit.
Menda was arrested in 1948 for the murder of a priest and his wife who lived nearby. The police held him for three weeks without access to a lawyer, and they tortured him into a confession. He was convicted in 1951, and spent those long thirty-four years in a solitary cell with virtually no human interaction, before finally being released.
Jeff is a freelance writer from Texas. He's married and has one son, and spends most of his time obsessing just a little too much over movies, television, and sports.
North Carolina brothers declared innocent, freed after 30 years in prison
By Marti Maguire
RALEIGH N.C. Tue Sep 2, 2014 7:12pm EDT
(Reuters) - Two North Carolina men were declared innocent and ordered freed on Tuesday after spending more than 30 years in prison for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl that recent DNA tests linked to another man.
Henry McCollum, 50, and his half brother Leon Brown, 46, were teenagers when they were arrested for the 1983 rape and killing of Sabrina Buie, whose body was left in a field in the small town of Red Springs.
McCollum is North Carolina's longest-serving death row inmate. Brown's sentence was reduced at a second trial to life in prison for rape.
At a court hearing, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser ordered both brothers to be freed. Local prosecutors did not contest their release.
"This is a tragedy," said Ken Rose, an attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation representing McCollum. "He's thankful to God that this day has come."
Brown and McCollum, 15 and 19 at the time, each signed a detailed confession to the crime written by police. They later claimed they had been coerced to do so with promises of release during intense interrogations.
Court records show both men are intellectually disabled with limited abilities to read or write.
None of the DNA collected at the scene was linked to Brown or McCollum.
Among the evidence presented in court on Tuesday was a DNA match linking a cigarette butt found near the victim's body to another man, Roscoe Artis, who was later sentenced to death for a similar rape and murder in the same town.
Now 74, Artis was living with this sister at the time of the murder in a home adjacent to the field where Buie was found.
He had a long history of assaulting women and was convicted of raping and murdering an 18-year-old girl a month later. He is serving a life sentence.
The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, an independent state agency, started investigating the case in 2010.
In an interview with the News & Observer in Raleigh while he was in prison, McCollum said he never gave up hope.
"Me and my brother lost 30 years for no reason at all," he said. "I have never stopped believing that one day I would be able to walk out of that door."
(Reporting by Marti Maguire; Editing by Letitia Stein and Eric Beech)
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