Wrongful Conviction Lawsuit Defense Blog : Wrongful Conviction Defense Lawyer & Attorney : Andrew M. Hale Law Firm

This week on Showtime, Penn & Teller will be offering their "professional" opinions on America's criminal justice system. The show is titled Bull!@#$ "criminal justice." Relying on information they have gathered from the Innocence Project, they are quick to be critical of police and prosecutors. Here is a short clip from their upcoming episode. We hope they present all sides of the issue and not just repeat a one sided spin.  Of all people  - Penn & Teller should know everything is not always the way it seems....

           

 

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At a forum for University of Missouri law and journalism students, Missouri University professor Steve Weinberg said that most cases of wrongful convictions are caused by incompetent and lazy defense attorneys.

Nice to finally hear someone not trying to blame the police for any and every alleged wrongful conviction.

Weinberg is the founder of an Innocence Project group on the Missouri campus.

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In a Dallas News Article Texas Governor Rick Perry defended the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004. Willingham was convicted of killing his three young daughters in a house fire. Governor Perry said that court records that he reviewed before the execution showed "clear and compelling, overwhelming evidence that [Willingham] was in fact the murderer of his children."  Perry was also quoted as stating that "I'm familiar with the latter-day supposed experts on the arson side of it." State fire investigators and fire officials maintained that burn patterns, cracked windows and other signs pointed to arson. Willingham suffered only superficial burns from the fire after he ran outside the house. He claimed the could not go back in his house to rescue his daughters because the fire was too intense. Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, who worked on the case, claims that Willingham was innocent. 

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We decided to launch our very own YouTube channel. 

Visit DontBlameTheCops YouTube Channel to see the latest media coverage on the Jerry Miller decision.  

Here is the ABC Channel 7 News coverage: 

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Barry Scheck and Jerry Miller speak at the Gel 2009 conference about Miller's wrongful conviction case.  Barry Scheck of Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin, represent Jerry Miller in his lawsuit.  

This speaking engagement came just days before United States District Court Judge Suzzane Conlon ruled in favor of the police officers in the lawsuit.  As previously report, Judge Conlon found that the officers had probable cause to arrest Miller.  The court further found that the lineup - where Miller was identified - was fair. 

Although Miller was exonerated on DNA evidence, the police did their jobs and did not commit any misconduct.  

 

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Andrew Hale & Associates has released the following press release which has been picked up by the Chicago Tribune , ABC7 News Chicago , WBBM780 , and the Newswire

Chicago, IL - August 17, 2009 -- A federal district court judge has ruled in favor of three retired Chicago police officers who were sued by Jerry Miller in a federal civil rights lawsuit. Miller was convicted in 1982 of raping a woman at a parking garage in the Gold Coast section of Chicago.

Miller was identified by two employees who worked at the parking garage and stopped a man - later identified as Miller - as he was attempting to drive his rape victim's car out of the parking garage, with the victim locked in the trunk.

After spending 26 years in prison, Miller was released after DNA testing from the crime scene proved that Miller was not the rapist. Shortly thereafter, Miller filed a civil lawsuit, alleging that several now retired Chicago police officers had framed him for the crime by conducting a suggestive lineup and failing to disclose material exculpatory evidence.

Judge Suzanne B. Conlon rejected all of Miller's claims against the officers and granted their motion for summary judgment in its entirety finding as a matter of law that the officers did not engage in any misconduct.

The retired police officers were represented by attorneys Andrew Hale, Avi Kamionski, Ebone Liggins, and Christina Liu from the law firm of Andrew M. Hale & Associates, LLC.

About Andrew M. Hale & Associates

Andrew M. Hale & Associates specializes in the defense of civil rights lawsuits brought against municipalities and police officers. The firm's principal attorneys are Andrew M. Hale and Avi T. Kamionski. The firm maintains a blog dedicated to the defense of police officers in wrongful conviction cases: www.wrongfulconvictionlawsuitdefense.com or www.dontblamethecops.com.

For more information contact: Andrew M. Hale, 312-341-9646, ahale@ahalelaw.com, www.ahalelaw.com

*Source Andrew M. Hale & Associates - Federal Court Case no. 08 C 773

 

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 Three retired Chicago police officers who were sued for allegedly framing plaintiff Jerry Miller received a total victory when District Court Judge Suzanne B. Conlon granted their motion for summary judgment in its entirely. Miller was convicted in 1982 of a brutal rape in the Gold Coast area of Chicago. He was convicted based on the testimony of two eyewitnesses who identified Miller as the man who attempted to drive his rape victim's car out a parking garage where they worked at the time. The parking lot attendants foiled the rapist's escape by preventing him from driving the car out of the parking garage. Miller spent 26 years in prison before being released in 2006 based on new DNA testing which showed that Miller was not the rapist. That DNA testing lead to the real culprit, Robert Weeks, who was already incarcerated for other sexual assaults. Miller subsequently brought a civil lawsuit against several retired Chicago police officers alleging that they framed him for the rape by conducting a suggestive lineup and photo array and by failing to disclose material evidence. In a 26-page opinion, Judge Conlon rejected all of Miller's claims and held that the Officers were entitled to summary judgment. Judge Conlon stated "The police officers are entitled to summary judgment on Count I for [Section] 1983 denial of a fair trial because Miller presents no genuine issue of material fact that the lineup and photo array were unduly suggestive or tainted his trial. He presents no genuine issue of material fact that evidence about the photo array was suppressed or material. And he presents no evidence of a conspiracy. The police officers are entitled to summary judgment on Miller's substantive due process claim because it is not legally viable, and Miller presents no genuine issue of material fact that the police officers fabricated evidence. Summary judgment is granted to the police officers on Count V for malicious prosecution because the undisputed facts demonstrate probable cause to arrest and prosecute Miller. Summary judgment is granted to the police officers on Count VI for IIED because Miller presents no genuine issue of material fact that the police officers fabricated evidence." The court's ruling confirmed what the defense attorneys had been stating all along - that this was an unfortunate case of eyewitness misidentification - not police misconduct. The police officers were represented by Andrew Hale, Avi Kamionski, Ebone Liggins, and Christina Liu from the firm of Andrew M. Hale & Associates, LLC. Plaintiff Jerry Miller was represented by John Stainthorp from the Peoples  Law Office and Nick Brustin, Peter Neufeld, and Barry Scheck from the Innocence Project.

Here is the opinion

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Today the Innocence Project released a new report entitled  Reevaluating Lineups: "Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification".  The new report discusses several attempts at reforming lineups, including: 

• Double-blind presentation: photos or lineup members should be presented by an administrator who does not know who the suspect is.

• Lineup composition: “Fillers” (the non-suspects included in a lineup) should resemble the eyewitness’s description of the perpetrator and the suspect should not stand out. Also, a lineup should not contain more than one suspect.

• Witness instructions: The person viewing a lineup should be told that the perpetrator may not be in the lineup and that the investigation will continue regardless of whether an identification is made.

• Confidence statements: At the time of the identification, the eyewitness should provide a statement in her own words indicating her level of confidence in the identification.

• Recording: Identification procedures should be videotaped.

• Sequential presentation (optional): Lineup members are presented one-by-one (by a “blind” administrator) instead of side by side.

 

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The Boston Globe is reporting:

The town of Ayer and five of its insurers have agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by the estate of the late Kenneth Waters, who spent more than 18 years in prison for a murder he did not commit before his sister earned a law degree and helped free him through DNA evidence.  The estate was represneted by Barry Sheck of Neufeld Sheck and Brustin.

Ayer police were accused of coercing false testimony to convict Waters and withholding evidence that could have cleared him. A sixth insurance company, Western World Insurance Group, has declined to settle, but negotiations are continuing. Kenneth Waters was freed from prison in March 2001, and the Middlesex district attorney’s office dropped the charges against him. But he enjoyed only six months of freedom. He died on Sept. 19, 2001, after he fell on his head from a 15-foot wall in Rhode Island while taking a shortcut to a restaurant.

Ayer’s town administrator, Shaun A. Suhoski, said the lawsuit was “a very complex case and, through the very diligent efforts of our legal team, with close oversight of the Board of Selectmen, it appears we’ve reached an acceptable endpoint in this litigation.’’

Kenneth Waters was convicted in 1983 of first-degree murder and armed robbery in the death of Katharina Brow. She was found on May 21, 1980, with more than 30 stab wounds, in her mobile home in Ayer. Waters; his girlfriend, Brenda Marsh; and two of her children, one of whom Waters had fathered, had been living in a house behind the mobile home.
 

According to the complaint filed by Betty Anne Waters, her brother had a solid alibi for his whereabouts when the killing occurred: He had been working a night shift at a local diner and then had a court appearance the next morning for an unrelated matter. Ayer police interviewed him after the killing, but filed no charges, and the case remained unsolved for 2 1/2 years.

 

In October 1982, a man who was living with Marsh approached Ayer police and said she told him that Waters had confessed to killing a woman in Ayer, according to the complaint. She also said she had washed Waters’s bloody clothes, he said. Ayer Police Chief Philip L. Connors and Officer Nancy Taylor-Harris interrogated Marsh. Although she initially denied that Waters had anything to do with the killing, Marsh ultimately relented and said he had come home drunk the morning that Brow was killed with a long, deep scratch on his face, according to the complaint. Police arrested Waters, even though officers had examined him after the killing and found no wounds.

The complaint alleged that Waters was indicted based in part on false testimony before a grand jury by Taylor-Harris that fingerprints found at the crime scene were smeared and useless to investigators. In fact, authorities found a bloody fingerprint on a broken toaster and a partial print on a kitchen faucet that was still running when Brow’s body was discovered. Taylor-Harris knew that Waters had been excluded as the source of the prints, the complaint alleged. Waters was convicted by a Middlesex Superior Court jury and sentenced to life in prison.

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The Houston Chronicle's website, chron.com is reporting:

 A federal jury on Thursday awarded $5 million to a Houston man who spent 17 years in prison for a kidnapping and rape he did not commit, finding the city should pay for its “deliberate indifference” to problems at the crime lab whose false evidence secured the conviction.

Ain’t no amount of money is going to even my scale,” Rodriguez said after hearing the verdict. “I lost my dad and my girls have been through hell. I am grateful, but no money could replace what I lost.” “This verdict says what I think we all know to be true about the Houston Police Department crime lab,” said Barry Scheck, one of Rodriguez’s lawyers and a co-founder of the Innocence Project, which helped secure his release from prison. “They convicted innocent men and the city was indifferent.”

City Attorney Arturo Michel, whose office defended the city, said officials would take a close look at the trial transcript to review questions of evidence and evaluate how the city would assess the case if it were retried before deciding whether to appeal. “The jury was deadlocked on the issue of whether Lee Brown was deliberately indifferent,” he said. “That meant that they had difficulty coming to a conclusion on the evidence.”

A jury of five women and three men deliberated for about two days after hearing testimony from former Mayor Lee P. Brown, who was police chief in 1987, James Bolding, a crime lab manager who testified at Rodriguez’s trial and from Rodriguez himself.

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The Houston Chronicle is reporting:

"A federal judge ordered jurors to resume deliberating today after the jury indicated Wednesday that it was at an impasse in the case of George Rodriguez, who sued the city of Houston for $35 million for its role in his wrongful conviction. A Houston Police Department crime lab analyst gave false testimony in Rodriguez’s 1987 trial, and Rodriguez was imprisoned for more than 17 years before DNA evidence exonerated him. The jury of five women and three men sent U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore a note Wednesday afternoon, after about six hours of deliberations. The panel said it is at an impasse on the question of whether, as police chief, Lee. P. Brown was deliberately indifferent to the lack of training and supervision in the crime lab and the chance a violation of someone’s constitutional right to a fair trial would result. To get to this point, the jury had to already find that the crime lab employee’s testimony played a substantial role in Rodriguez’s conviction and that the city had an official policy or custom of allowing the crime lab personnel to be inadequately trained and supervised. If the jury can agree that Brown was indifferent to the constitutional risks, it has two more questions to address. It has to decide if the problems with the lab were “the moving force” behind the violation of Rodriguez’s rights and, if so, how much the city should pay Rodriguez." 

Refreshing to see the jury take their time and work through each claim.  Sympathy for Mr. Rodriguez should not be the reason to tag the City of Houston for millions. Plaintiffs must be held to their burden. Stay tuned for jury verdict....

 

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The Houston Chronicle reports: 

George Rodriguez’s lawyer asked a federal jury Monday to make the city pay “tens of millions of dollars” for the disgraced Houston Police Department’s crime lab’s pivotal role in the wrongful conviction that put his client behind bars for 17 years.

“What was taken away from him was his youth,” said attorney , whose Innocence Project works on behalf of convicts in similar circumstances. Rodriguez went to prison wrongly at age 26 and walked out at 43 to find his three daughters grown and his father dead, the lawyer said.

In opening statements Tuesday afternoon, Scheck told jurors about the loneliness, fear and depression his client suffered in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.

This happened, he said, because policy makers at the city of Houston were deliberately indifferent to rampant under funding, under staffing and a lack of supervision at the crime lab that created a high risk an innocent person could be convicted or the guilty one could go free.

“We will prove that a false and misleading serology report violated (Rodriguez’s) constitutional right to a fair trial,” Scheck told jurors in U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore’s court. A key piece of evidence in the criminal case was a pubic hair found in the girl’s underwear. A Houston police crime lab specialist testified falsely that the serology report on that hair eliminated another suspect, Isidro Yanez, but not Rodriguez. The case was tried before DNA evidence was used in court. DNA tests done 17 years later showed the hair belonged to Yanez.
Brown, Holmes blamed Scheck said evidence will show the lab specialist had a pattern of changing findings to match what the police and prosecutors wanted.

One of the policy makers Scheck blames is Lee P. Brown, the former Houston mayor who was police chief in 1987 when Rodriguez was convicted. Brown is scheduled to testify in the case, as is former Harris District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr., who was top prosecutor at the time of the trial. Rodriguez originally sued Harris County and others but dismissed all parties except for the city of Houston, who his lawyers say is most clearly culpable.

But Robert Cambrice, a lawyer for the city, told jurors that it was bad lawyering by the prosecutor and Rodriguez’s late defense attorney that led to the false conviction, not an unquestioned lie by a city employee. He said there was no city policy that led to the error in this case and under funding didn’t cause the employee to lie. “No city policy makers approved of unconstitutional fabrication of evidence,” Cambrice said. Cambrice asked the jury not to be overcome by the emotion surrounding Rodriguez’s ordeal.

The trail is likely to last two weeks. The five-woman, three-man jury heard from an assistant police chief late Tuesday about how the city didn’t closely investigate crime lab problems until after a 2002 local television report. That finally led to a $5 million independent investigation that highlighted Rodriguez’s case and others, she said.

It wasn’t until 2004 that a local court ruled Rodriguez should be freed because of the inaccurate trial testimony. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later vacated Rodriguez’s conviction. He has never received an official pardon and thus has received no compensation from the state.

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The newswire is reporting that a documentary called "Witch Hunt" -  a story about the arrest, conviction, and later exoneration of dozens of Bakersfield, California adults for alleged child sex abuse in the mid-1980s - will make its world television premiere April 12 on MSNBC.

According to the press release: 

Witch Hunt weaves the larger Bakersfield story through the travails of John Stoll, a construction worker, who while in the midst of a custody battle over his young son was accused of sexually abusing the boy and five other children. Stoll was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison despite glaring problems, among them, a lack of physical evidence, suggestive questioning of the children by authorities, irregularities in the investigation, and overreaching by prosecutors.

Stoll's conviction was ultimately reversed after three Northern California Innocence Project attorneys and 10 Santa Clara University law students proved, after two years and thousands of borrowed dollars, that the methods used to interview the child witnesses produced false testimony.

After witnessing firsthand the dedicated team and vital services provided by the Innocence Project, which has lost the government funding it once received, directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy decided to donate a portion of the profits from the sale of the DVD to NCIP.

"We learned a little bit about the epidemic of wrongful convictions in this country, where over two million people are incarcerated," said Hardy. "If even one percent of those prisoners are innocent, a very low estimate by most experts, that means more than twenty thousand people are looking toward agencies like the Innocence Project for help. Dana and I want to do our part to help them continue to fight for the rights of the wrongly convicted.

The documentary is narrated by Academy Award(R) winning actor Sean Penn, with music by Pearl Jam (whose lead singer, Eddie Vedder, donated the song after viewing an early version of the film).

 

 

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This is the second, in just the last week, where a man professing his innocence had his guilt re-affirmed through DNA testing.  Charles Hunter got his wish after years in prison. However, things did not go according to the plan he had when writing 46 letters to a Lawrence, Kansas newspaper. Hunter's DNA instead confirmed that he in fact did commit a series of rapes in Kansas in 1978.

According to the Lawrence Journal World & News, Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson announced that DNA testing results failed to exonerate Charles Hunter.

The Innocence Project commented on the Hunter case:

Eric Ferrero, communications director at the Innocence Project, said the results “confirms the prosecution’s theory at the trial.” Ferrero said Hunter’s case with the Innocence Project is now closed.That might seem like a loss for the Innocence Project and the cause of wrongful convictions, but Ferrero said his organization’s goal is not based on which person the DNA evidence incriminates or exonerates.“ DNA evidence can prove innocence or guilt,” said Ferrero, whose agency has documented 233 cases in the United State where DNA evidence has led to exoneration. “Our cause is to get to the truth in these cases.”

 

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 A Wisconsin man, convicted in 1984 of the murder of a 63 year old woman, has been freed from prison after 23 years. A judge vacated the sentence after the Wisconsin Innocence Project convinced the judge that the DNA and bite-mark analysis did not match the evidence at the crime scene. However, the Milwaukee County District Attorney has not yet given up.

According to the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter:

 

Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Norman Gahn didn't oppose his release, although he said Friday he has six months to decide whether to retry him. Gahn wouldn't elaborate. District Attorney  said in a statement that Stinson's conviction was not wrongful, and that he was convicted based on "state-of-the-art scientific evidence available at the time of his trial."

"The question today is whether there is newly discovered evidence in this case to warrant a new trial, and we agree that such evidence exists," Chisholm said. The statement did not describe the nature of the evidence. Stinson was convicted in 1985 in the murder of a 63-year-old Milwaukee woman the previous year. Ione F. Cyshosz was last seen by a friend who dropped her at her home after playing bingo. Her near-naked body was found the next morning, her head bloody and beaten and a number of bite marks on her torso. A police officer arrested Stinson in the area after saying the teeth of the then-21-year-old matched the bite marks.

At the trial, two forensic odontologists testified that Stinson's teeth were a match, even though Stinson was apparently missing a tooth in a place where the bite marks indicated a tooth, Lichstein, said. He said he didn't know why that didn't cast doubt on the case against Stinson at the beginning, but newer technology indicated there was no match."Every piece of evidence in the case points away from him," Byron Lichstein (Attorney for the Wisconsin Innocence Project) said. "He has a very powerful claim of innocence."

Bite mark identification is becoming an increasingly interesting phenomenon in wrongful conviction law. The Innocence Project reports that eight people in five states have had convictions overturned from faulty bite-mark analysis. Still, many odontologists insist that, if applied properly, bite-mark analyisis is reliable scientific evidence.

It is clear how a criminal conviction can be attacked through the means of faulty bite-mark analysis. However, any subsequent lawsuit against police or a municipality for this type of wrongful conviction should be hard to prove. Bite-mark analysis was deemed wholly reliable at the time, and many experts still deem it as reliable. Therefore, it surely should give police and prosecutors probable cause to arrest and prosecute which would bar any civil claim.

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Last week, we shared the story of a man who has yet to receive his compensation for his wrongful conviction.  As discussed, not all states have compensation systems in place. Nebraska is one such place.  The Innocence Project of Nebraska is trying to change that.  Omaha's WOWT-DT Channel 6 is reporting: 

The Nebraska Innocence Project is calling on state lawmakers to compensate those wrongfully convicted. Their request comes in advance of the anticipated pardoning of five of the "Beatrice 6," January 26th. Nebraska is one of 25 states without a statute providing compensation to those who are wrongly convicted. The Nebraska Innocence Project is lobbying for the passage of legislation. The group says it's needed not only as compensation for a past wrong, but to help those affected transition back into society with mental and vocational counseling, as well as job training.  Six individuals in total were accused of taking part in the 1985 rape and murder of Helen Wilson of Beatrice. However, they were cleared of wrongdoing through DNA evidence on November 7th. Joseph White did not seek a pardon because the charges against him were dropped.“The releases and pardons, acknowledging that a horrendous wrong has been done these people, are to Nebraska's credit," said Rebecca Murray, president of the Nebraska Innocence Project. "Many individuals who are exonerated in this country do not receive such a message.” She added, “Pardoning is not enough. These individuals deserve more than a pardon, more than an apology. They deserve resources to begin to put their lives back together.” Last week Senator Kent Rogert introduced LB 260, “Nebraska Claims for Wrongful Conviction and Imprisonment Act.” It would provide monetary and in-kind compensation to the Beatrice 6 and any future wrongly convicted claimants, and would expunge the conviction from their records. 

According to the The New York Times Sunday edition: 

Last month, the Nebraska attorney general, Jon Bruning, said DNA evidence conclusively linked another man, Bruce A. Smith of Oklahoma, to the rape and murder of Ms. Wilson, 68, who was killed on Feb. 6, 1985. Mr. Smith died of AIDS in 1992.  In a pre-session survey by The Associated Press, 14 Nebraska senators or senators-elect said they would support a measure providing compensation to exonerated inmates. Five said they would not, and 20 said they were not sure. One did not answer the question, and nine did not participate in the survey.

Any compensation package that is established in Nebraska should include a no-sue clause.  If a wrongfully convicted individual receives compensation he or she should be prohibited from seeking more money in a lawsuit.  

 

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 The Chicago Tribune is reporting: 

Clyde Charles, the first inmate to use a federal civil rights law to sue for DNA testing that not only cleared him of a Louisiana rape conviction but also sent his brother to prison for the same crime, has died. He was 55.

Mr. Charles died Jan. 7 of natural causes at his home, relatives told The Courier newspaper. His health problems included diabetes that required dialysis, they said.

He was the first inmate to sue under the federal Civil Rights Act to get his DNA compared to DNA samples held as evidence, said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, a legal center specializing in wrongful conviction cases

After Mr. Charles was sentenced to life in prison for the 1981 rape of a nurse who identified him as her attacker, he pleaded with authorities to conduct DNA testing against evidence collected in the case.

Although investigators had semen samples from the victim, the technology to compare DNA samples didn't exist during Mr. Charles' trial.

Clyde Charles had a tough life after his release from prison, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares and terrible pain from his diabetes, Scheck said Tuesday.

In early 2003, Mr. Charles was arrested on a charge that he had stabbed one of his other brothers, but was released on $100,000 bail for intensive drug rehabilitation. That case was continued indefinitely in a deal brokered with state prosecutors.

"I wish I could tell you they lived happily ever after. But they didn't," Scheck said.

(Photo Above: Kirk Bloodsworth (left) spent 9 years in prison and Clyde Charles (right) was on Death Row 18 years before Scheck (center) used DNA testing to prove their innocence).  

 

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Jerry Miller, who was released from prison in March 2006, after being incarcerated for 26 years, recently had his conviction expunged due to DNA testing that showed he did not rape a 44 year old woman back in 1981 on the roof of a parking garage at 506 N. Rush Street in Chicago. Miller became a suspect when police officers thought he looked like a sketch of the attacker. Miller was brought in for a lineup and identified by two parking lot attendants. At trial, the victim testified that Miller looked like her attacker. Miller denied any role in the crime. After a trial, the jury found Miller guilty of rape, robbery, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated battery. Judge Thomas Maloney sentenced him to 45 years in prison. Miller's case was reviewed by the Innocence Project in New York, which triggered the DNA testing of the victim's slip. After Miller was excluded by DNA tests, the unknown DNA profile was submitted to the FBI's convicted offender database and a match was found. Miller was represented by assistant public defender William Wolf and Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld from the Innocence Project.

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