Wrongful Convictions and The Innocence Project

While societal outcries against crime often stem from empathy towards the victims, a hidden victim maybe those who are falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned.  The Innocence Project, a national litigation and policy organization from the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, founded in 1992, seeks to identify and exonerate previously convicted individuals who are innocent. It is the headquarters of the Innocence Network of 70 organizations that cover all 50 States and 12 countries outside the US. They often find new evidence such as DNA testing results and use other scientific means to reopen such cases.

The Central Park 5 case, illustrates how underprivileged teens of color, can be falsely accused of committing a sexual assault against a white female jogger in New York City’s Central Park.  As a result of media pressure to find the perpetrators, the boys were threatened with false confessions.  Only after years of incarceration, the true criminal confessed to the crime.

In another case of wrongful conviction, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, intellectually disabled teens, were convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to death.  Law enforcement coerced them into signing false confessions with threats of the death penalty in North Carolina.  After 30 years of imprisonment, new DNA evidence from the crime scene exonerated the two brothers and found Roscoe Artis a local serial rapist and murderer, guilty of the crime.  

A 19-year-old black American, Darryl Hunt was falsely convicted of rape and murder of a white woman in 1984.  His girlfriend initially gave alibi testimony but later claimed he admitted to the crime when she was arrested for larceny. She retracted this statement before the trial but the trial proceeded.  New DNA evidence in 1994 showed that Hunt was innocent, but he was imprisoned until 2004 exoneration after Willard Brown confessed and had matching DNA to the crime.  Mr. Hunt founded the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice to advocate for the wrongfully accused but unfortunately suffered from mental health issues and died in 2016 from suicide.