Man in prison 19 years for molesting freed after claim recanted

[Sal]

There you go. These guys did have a death sentence and got it commuted by sheer luck of timing. Ten years later or earlier and they probably would have been executed.

yup, once they are dead, ain't no bringing them back

all these for certain guilties...useless if it was done under pressure to solve the case

and TBones said odds are usually against the defense and it is an adversarial system not a truth seeking system

until we have a justice system which seeks truth over numbers prosecuted the death penalty can NOT be

 

[tay]

A 70-year-old man wrongly convicted of the 1976 stabbing deaths of a mother and daughter walked out of prison Friday, saying he was looking forward to sleeping in a real bed and maybe swimming in a pool.


After serving nearly four decades behind bars, Joseph Sledge was found innocent by a three-judge panel who heard testimony from a DNA expert. The expert said none of the evidence collected in the case — hair, DNA and fingerprints — belonged to Sledge.


A key jailhouse informant had also recanted his story, saying authorities promised him leniency in his own case for his trial testimony against Sledge.


A district attorney who was not originally involved apologized to Sledge and promised to reopen the investigation.


“The system has made a mistake,” district attorney Jon David said.


The key jailhouse informant, Herman Baker, signed an affidavit in 2013 recanting trial testimony. Baker said he lied at the 1978 trial after being promised leniency in his own drug case and he said he’d been coached by authorities on what to say.




more




Judges free 70-year-old wrongly convicted of murder 40 years ago | New York Post

 

[skookumchuck]

I absolutely agree that unwitnessed (outside of hearsay) crimes should never demand the death penalty, but there are situations that simply require it.

 

[Laneagan]

Hi Lane, welcome to the forum...remember those cases where the children charged a daycare with using them for Satanic worship...it's a wonder those people weren't burned alive at the stake, it ruined all of their lives financially at least. Later it was realized all wrong, all lies and coercion and misunderstanding.

Yes I do believe that happened in Saskatchewan.

 

[tay]

More Prisoners Were Found Innocent in 2014 Than Ever Before, And We're Barely Even Looking






The University of Michigan's National Registry of Exonerations announced in a report released Tuesday that a record 125 people across the United States were in 2014 exonerated of crimes they were falsely convicted of, beating 2013's 91 people.






How many innocent people are there? It's hard to tell. The Innocent Project estimates that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the country are innocent, and since the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with an estimated 2.4 million state, federal and county prisoners in 2014, that would mean somewhere between 55,000 and 120,000 of them were innocent.


Other researchers have pegged the number of innocent death row prisoners at about 4.1%, or one in 25, with the actual innocence rate among the many prisoners serving long-term sentences even higher. By that metric, the U.S. has likely sentenced over 200 innocent people to death since 1978.


There are just 15 Conviction Integrity Units around the country, which have so far generated 90 exonerations since 2003 (according to the NRE, more than half of which happened in 2014). There's no telling what would happen if every jurisdiction had a CIU, but the U.S. locks up an awful lot of people, so there would probably be more than enough suspect cases to keep them busy.

That's not even considering the extraordinarily long prison sentences many convicted offenders receive, often for relatively minor crimes. According to MSNBC, one-quarter of the Justice Department's budget now goes to the costs of locking up non-violent prisoners.


Why you should care: Not only does the U.S. have the highest incarceration rate in the world and harsh sentencing practices, it turns out that a significant number of the people languishing in jail might not have even committed a crime in the first place.

Record numbers of exonerations are good news. It shows that many of the falsely convicted are receiving more attention than they would have previously. But it looks like there's still a lot of digging around in old case files to do, and many innocent people still in jail.




more




More Prisoners Were Found Innocent in 2014 Than Ever Before, And We're Barely Even Looking - Mic

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

I was a teacher and know that children are not immune to LYING if it furthers their cause. Lane

I was a student, and I can attest to the truth of that statement.