List of Miscarriage of Justice Cases - List of Cases - United States - Twentieth Century

Twentieth Century

• 1914; William Walters, convicted for the 1912 kidnapping of Bobby Dunbar, was released after serving two years of his sentence when prosecutors chose not to conduct a second trial. In 2004, DNA profiling established in retrospect that the boy found with Walters and returned to the Dunbars as Bobby had not been a blood relative of the Dunbar family.
• 1920; Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, tried and sentenced to death for the killing of two people during a robbery in 1920. In 1977, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation, stating they had not been treated justly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." The question of their actual guilt or innocence was not resolved by the Dukakis proclamation.
• 1923; Marcus Garvey, convicted of mail fraud in a prosecution focused largely on his political activism. Garvey's sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge.
• 1931; Scottsboro Boys
• 1937; Isidore Zimmerman, was imprisoned from 1937 to 1962 for a murder he did not commit. 21 years later the New York Court of Claims awarded him $1,000,000 for his ordeal. He died 4 months later, after having spent 24 of his 66 years in prison. Zimmerman had his death penalty commuted to a life term just hours before he was scheduled to be electrocuted (he willingly sought execution because of the intense psychological torture of being on death row).
• 1949; Iva Toguri D'Aquino was convicted of treason. She had been one of the women making propaganda broadcasts as 'Tokyo Rose'. She served a little more than six years of her ten-year sentence. Evidence that prosecution witnesses had lied at trial led President Gerald Ford to pardon her in January 1977.
• 1954; Dr. Sam Sheppard, American convicted in 1954 of killing his wife in their home; Sheppard maintained she had been killed by an intruder, appealed his case to the Supreme Court. After serving ten years in prison, he was granted a new trial and was finally acquitted. A television series and film both of whom are widely believed to have been inspired by his story.
• 1961; Clarence Earl Gideon who was convicted in 1961 of robbery, successfully argued in the Supreme Court in the case Gideon v. Wainwright that his trial was unfair due to his lack of an attorney because of his inability to pay for one. He was given a retrial in 1963 with a free public defender and was acquitted.
• 1965; Peter Limone, Joseph Salvati and the families of the two other men who died in prison were awarded $101.7 million as compensation for framing by the FBI.
• 1973; George Whitmore, Jr. was exonerated of the 1963 Career Girls Murders.
• 1974; Michael Austin was released in 2001 of murder during an armed robbery in Baltimore, Maryland, after 27 years of incarceration. He was pardoned, and in 2004 was awarded compensation of $1.4 million.
• 1976; Robert Wilkinson, Pennsylvania – Philadelphia County, 1976: Philadelphia Police beat him into signing a confession and intimidated witnesses to identify him. He was convicted of arson and murder and sentenced to five consecutive life terms. He was released later in the year after the actual perpetrators were convicted in federal court. The charges were refilled in 1977; indictments dismissed three months later. A federal court ruled prosecutor David Berman ignored, withheld and/or destroyed exculpatory evidence; the actual perpetrators came to him and confessed. In dismissing Wilkinson's later indictment, the court ruled the prosecution was being maintained in bad faith. Prosecutors still insist he is guilty.
• 1976; Randall Dale Adams convicted of the 1976 murder of police officer Robert Wood in Texas largely due to testimony from David Ray Harris, who was later executed for a similar murder. Errol Morris' film, The Thin Blue Line explored his case and caused a closer examination, resulting in his release after 12 years in prison – 4 of them on death row.
• 1979; Gary Dotson, was the second person whose conviction (in 1979) was overturned because of DNA evidence, in 1989.
• 1980; Cornelius Dupree, of Houston, Texas, was convicted of aggravated robbery, which was alleged to have been committed during a rape in 1979. He was sentenced to 75 years in prison and paroled during the summer of 2010. After DNA evidence cleared him of the crime, he was declared innocent in January 2011. His 30 years of imprisonment is the longest of any exonerated inmate in Texas.
• 1981; Clarence Brandley, Montgomery County, Texas, was convicted of capital murder in 1981. In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Brandley's conviction, finding that police and prosecutors, including James Keeshan, failed to investigate leads pertaining to other suspects, suppressed evidence placing other suspects at crime scene at time of crime, failed to call a witness who didn't support the state's case, allowed the perjured testimony of a witness to go uncorrected, and failed to notify Brandley that another man later confessed to the crime.
• 1982; Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, were intimidated by police into confessions for the 1982 rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter and convicted. In 1999, DNA evidence exonerated them.
• 1983; John Gordon Purvis, Broward County, Florida, a severely mentally ill person, despite no physical evidence that he was even at the scene of the murder, was intimidated by police into confessing to the murder of Susan Hamwi and her daughter in 1983. Later, investigators found that Paul Hamwi, Susan Hamwi's ex-husband, had hired Robert Wayne Beckett Sr. and Paul Serio to murder Susan Hamwi and Purvis was exonerated in 1993.
• 1984; Darryl Hunt, convicted in 1984 of the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, spent 19 years in prison, 9 of which were served after DNA evidence indicated that he did not commit the rape. Since Hunt was an African American, the case was heavily charged with the topic of race relations.
• 1984; Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon was wrongly convicted of the Florida murder of Delbert Baker. He spent over 17 years on Death Row and was released from prison on January 3, 2002.
• 1985: In 1982 Scott and Brenda Kniffen of Kern County California were accused, and in 1985 sentenced to over 240 years, each, in prison on charges that they abused and molested their young sons. It was later revealed the charges were completely fabricated by overzealous prosecutors and police. The Kniffens spent 14 years in prison before being released. This case was the subject of a 2001 Lifetime Television film called Just Ask My Children.
• 1986; the Roscetti Four - Marcellius Bradford, 17, Calvin Ollins, 14, Larry Ollins, 16, and Omar Saunders, 18 - were convicted of the kidnapping, rape and murder of 23-year-old medical student Lori Roscetti in Chicago. Bradford pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of aggravated kidnapping provided testimony at Larry Ollins's trial in exchange to a sentence of 12 years; the other three were sentenced to life imprisonment. Bradford later recanted, saying that his confession, plea bargain and testimony had been coerced by Chicago police. At the original trials, crime lab analyst Pamela Fish had testified that semen found on the victim's body could have come from the Ollins brothers, but later examinations of her notes revealed that none of the four boys' blood types matched the crime scene evidence. In 2001, DNA testing exonerated all four men; their convictions were vacated and they were released from prison. In April 2002, their case was profiled on an episode of This American Life entitled "Perfect Evidence." In 2003, The four men were awarded $120,000 from the State of Illinois, and Calvin Ollins received an additional $1.5 million from the City of Chicago.
• 1992; Joshua Rivera, 36, was sentenced 37 years for a 1992 murder. On September 19, 1992, Leonard Aquino was in front of a building and was approached by a couple of men who spoke briefly, then opened fire. Mr. Aquino was killed; another man, Paul Peralta, was shot, but survived. Rivera was known to people in the building and had a conviction for gun possession. He was charged and convicted of the crime. In 2006 Jaime Acevedo confessed he drove the real killer to the murder scene, and that Rivera was not involved. Prior to a court decision, Rivera accepted a plea agreement where he pled no contest to manslaughter.
• 1999; The Tulia incident, in which 46 people, forty who were African-American, were arrested on a drug sting under undercover officer Tom Coleman. Despite the lack of credible evidence, many pled guilty to receive lesser sentences believing they would not receive a fair trial (those convicted received harsher sentences). Further investigations and other evidence led to the release of most of the "Tulia 46" by 2004, who were further compensated a total of $6,000,000 collectively to avoid further litigation.

As the ability to sequence small samples of DNA has improved over the years, overturning of wrongful convictions has increased dramatically.