It would be hard to call Mr. Taylor lucky, but the truth is thousands just like him, including innocent children, are being victimized by a presumption of guilt that never sees black and brown youth as blameless, as engaged in proverbial "good, clean, fun" as harmless. Instead it attributes to them every violence and vice, even if those suspicions contradict the facts.

...

The presumption of guilt follows too many poor and minority children to school, a place where children should be nurtured and supported, not criminalized and incarcerated. Yet the pipeline from school to jail is so insidious, many parents now fear schools as much as they fear the criminal justice system.

During Taylor's trial, a profiler swore under oath that the likely perpetrator was "a black teenager." Taylor was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to multiple life sentences.

Despite progress, in the last 50 years we have retreated from an honest conversation about racial and economic justice, and have opted instead for mass criminalization and incarceration leaving many poor and minority people marginalized and condemned. As Taylor's story reminds us, out of sight is hardly out of mind. It is an abysmal violation of human dignity.

Read the full editorial.

More on Taylor's case.

"I'm like a deer in the headlights," he told lawmakers, some of whom cried over his story.

Dewey, a motorcycle enthusiast, plans to ride to the state Capitol on Wednesday to see the legislation signed. According to the legislation, Dewey and future exonerees will have to obtain health insurance and complete a financial management course. The measure also specifies that a future Class 1 or 2 felony conviction will discontinue the compensation.

Read the full article.

Read about Dewey's case.

More about compensation for the wrongly convicted.

"It was hard enough to be innocent to begin with," Beach told The Associated Press less than two hours before his surrender. "But to be going back, still innocent, for the second time, is just unbelievable."

Billings Mayor Tom Hanel said the high court's 4-3 ruling upholding the original conviction denied Beach his chance to prove his innocence. Hanel said he befriended Beach at the local diner where he found employment after his release.

"It's a question of whether justice has really been served and if a fair opportunity has been provided," Hanel said.

Beach's attorneys promised to fight for his release, saying that the case could potentially go to federal courts or even the U.S. Supreme Court.

Read the full article.

Read more about the Beach case.

Read more about false confessions.

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Rikers Island, an island jail-complex in the middle of New York City's East River, is listed as the tenth worst facility on the Mother Jones list. Rikers is infamous for its deeply entrenched patterns of violence, abuse at the hands of guards and high numbers of inmates in solitary confinement. The majority of the 10,000 inmates on Rikers Island have not yet been tried.

"A horror," Gibbs says. "Every day was an absolute nightmare." Gibbs spent nearly two years there, awaiting the trial that would eventually wrongfully convict him of murder. He served over 17 years in prison before his exoneration in 2005, and although he was bounced around to several different New York State prisons-including Attica-Rikers still stands out as the worst in his memory.

"It's a very dangerous place for a person who is innocent, for someone who has had nothing to do with the criminal justice system." On his third day in Rikers, Gibbs walked into the main room of his housing unit to get a cup of coffee. Suddenly, a blanket was thrown over his head and six men began to punch and kick him. "And the whole time I'm wondering, where's the security? Who's watching? Where are the guards?" he says. "Finally, they stopped, but I was all messed up, and I had to go to court the next day."

Gibbs continued to assert his innocence to anyone who would listen. "When I first got there, I kept saying over and over that I was innocent. They didn't want to hear it. They put me in the Mental Observation ward and forced me to take Sinequan [an anti-anxiety medication]. It turns out that I was allergic to it. My whole body swelled up. I had to go to the hospital. They took me to Bellevue, handcuffed, and in chains and shackles with the other prisoners. They dragged us down the hallway of the hospital like that. Everyone could see us. I could hear the people saying 'look at those murderers.' Do you know how humiliating that is?"

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In 1993, faced with the high cost of constructing a new jail to accommodate the ever-expanding inmate population, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio found that housing inmates in Korean War-era military tents-in the baking hot Arizona desert-would be more cost effective than constructing a new facility. Tent City, as it has become known, is an extension of Phoenix's Maricopa County Jail, housing approximately 2,000 inmates. The conditions at Tent City-which Sheriff Arpaio likened to 'a concentration camp'-landed it the number three spot on Mother Jones' list.

Ray Krone, who was wrongfully imprisoned (and later sentenced to death) for a murder he did not commit, was housed at Maricopa County Jail until he was convicted and moved to prison. "It's Arizona, and you're living outside. The coolest it gets is in the 90's, maybe, at night. There's one fan in this giant tent for about 40 guys... the tough guys got to be near the fan, so there was a lot of violence and fights over that cool area." In 2011, the Arizona Republic reported that the internal temperature at Tent City surged to 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

I asked him about the food. "It was the stuff that wasn't fit to be sold in stores, so the inmates got it," he said. "The sheriff would brag about spending 50 cents a day on his inmates and a dollar a day on his dogs."

Like Gibbs, Krone was also prescribed antipsychotic medication. "If you're facing the death penalty, like I was, you didn't have to get real forceful to be put on psych meds. In fact, during most of my trial, I was on Thorazine. On the weekends, when I wasn't in court, they would come around with a cart to give you your pills. But it's so violent in there; you don't want to walk around all blocked out from the drugs. I needed my mind about me. So I'd hide the pills under my tongue."

Krone was finally exonerated through DNA testing in 2002 after 10 years in prison. He says, "You're treated like a criminal from day one. There is no innocent until proven guilty. It's guilty until proven innocent."

Krone and Gibbs' experiences are sobering reminders that innocent people continue to inhabit our prisons and jails. DNA testing provides the opportunity to identify and free some of the innocent, but those cases are a select minority. Many others will serve out their sentences or die behind bars. At the very least, our correctional institutions should be habitable for them.

Read the Mother Jones series.

The state's indisputably defective death penalty system is made more horrifying by attempts to rush inmates to execution. There is a strong chance that Mr. Aguirre-Jarquin will become the 25th death-row inmate exonerated in Florida since it reinstated capital punishment in 1973. More death-row inmates have been exonerated in Florida than in any state.

As the American Bar Association explained in a scathing 2006 report on the state's death penalty system, Florida is one of the few states that allows a jury to recommend a sentence of death based on a majority vote rather than a unanimous one. Defendants charged with capital crimes often have woefully unqualified counsel, and are much more likely to be convicted and sentenced to death if the victim is white - a sign of racial disparity that is clearly unconstitutional. The flaws in Florida's system, which soaks up huge amounts of resources, cannot be fixed. It is long past time to abolish capital punishment.

Aguirre has been on Florida's death row since 2006 for the murders of Williams and Bareis, a mother and daughter who were found stabbed to death in their trailer in Seminole County on June 17, 2004. New DNA testing reveals Aguirre's innocence and points to a family member of the victims as the perpetrator.

The Innocence Project and lead counsel for Aguirre are presenting compelling new evidence at a hearing this week. Aguirre's family was unable to travel from Honduras to attend the hearing, but he was joined in court yesterday by New York exoneree John Restivo who resides in Florida and the parents of Florida exoneree Wilton Dedge, who was exonerated in the same county where the hearing is taking place.

Read the full editorial.

Read coverage of the hearing.

Thompson is a free man today because of the so-called "Brady" rule. But he likely would have been a free man all along -- without spending 14 years on death row -- had his prosecutors obeyed the law in the first place. That dichotomy is what makes Thompson such a poignant symbol of the Brady rule. He proves both that it works and that it is deeply flawed; that it saves innocent people from being railroaded by prosecutors and that countless others are wrongly convicted and imprisoned anyway. The sad truth is that 50 years after Brady, in an increasingly complex criminal justice system, too many prosecutors still hide exculpatory evidence, and too few judges do anything about it.

A rare example of being held accountable for a Brady violation occurred last month in Texas, when a court ruled that former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson will face criminal contempt and tampering charges for failing to turn over evidence pointing to the innocence of Michael Morton, who was later exonerated by DNA evidence after serving 25 years for his wife's murder, despite a court order and legal obligation to do so.

Anderson faces relatively minor charges. But if it were up to Thompson, Anderson would be facing attempted murder charges. "What happens when we learn that a district attorney has killed an innocent man?" he asked me yesterday. "Isn't it premeditated murder? What are we willing to accept" from our prosecutors?

Read the full article.

Watch our video about the Thompson case and the One for Ten video about the case.

With the proposed legislation, lawmakers hope to reduce chances for prosecutors to overlook evidence of innocence. The law would require prosecutors to give defense lawyers access to evidence in the state's file without regard to the information's potential impact on the verdict.

"It telegraphs legislators' intent that they want prosecutors to err on the side of disclosure," Scheck said. "That's how you take care of this problem."

Read the full article.

In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were "a classic illustration of what not to do." Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, "We have the guy who committed the murder."

"That was wrong if I did that," Mr. Scarcella said. "But I don't remember."

Interviews with lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest Scarcella didn't comply with the rules during his investigations.

Read the full article.

"You can't go through something like this and not be angry. It's what you do with it that defines you," said Thibodeaux.

See Damon in his new community.

Read about Thibodeaux's case.

Anderson says she wasn't surprised when she heard of the appeal-there's little that warrants surprise in this kind of law, she says.

"Disappointed is a better word," she says.

But it was more than disappointing for Brown. "It was a really black day," Brown says. "It was like being pronounced cancer-free, and then, bam! You're in third stage again."

Brown was convicted of murdering her boss, 75-year-old Lael Brown, in 1995 and spent 17 years behind bars before her release. RMIC has presented new evidence of alternate suspects and witnesses in their advocacy for Brown's exoneration.

The Utah Supreme Court is currently considering the appeal. If it reverses the judge's innocence finding, Brown could be sent back to prison. On the other hand, if it upholds the decision, Brown will be eligible for state compensation and will be one of the very few who has been exonerated under the statute. Utah is one of only two states that even has a factual innocence statute, which allows for a retrial in cases where there is newly discovered material evidence of innocence but no DNA evidence.

The City Weekly writes:

As Brown waits for the Utah Supreme Court's decision, she deals with triggers that bring her back to those years in prison. The sound of keys jingling reminds her of prison guards. She bought dark curtains for her bedroom because car lights from the parking lot remind her of a flashlight beam shining in her face. She still has nightmares of going back.

Read the full article.

Read more about the case.

Some states, including New York and Illinois, have a straightforward process for erasing or sealing criminal records after a wrongful conviction. But legal researchers say that most state laws are out of date with the recent waves of exonerations, and require onetime convicts already declared not guilty to once again prove their innocence.

Vincent Moto, who served nearly nine years in prison for a rape and robbery DNA testing proved he didn't commit, was recently denied his petition to have his record expunged. Moto was exonerated in 1996.

Audrey Edmunds, who spent more than a decade in prison for the shaking death of an infant girl before new medical evidence prompted her conviction to be overturned, continues to struggle with the mark on her criminal record, though she was exonerated five years ago.

"I hate it," said Ms. Edmunds, 52, who now lives in northern Wisconsin. "They put us through enough to begin with. They don't give us any assistance. I'm glad to be out, but there's got to be more support. I don't like having this awful nightmare of a cloud hanging over me."

Read the full article.

Read more about the challenges that exonerated people face after release.

Carrie Wood, Noling's attorney from the University of Cincinnati-based Ohio Innocence Project, said the ruling is another step in helping prove Noling's innocence but is also a victory for others struggling to get DNA testing approved.

"When the new law was passed in 2010, the legislature made it clear that there needs to be more testing in cases and not less," Wood said. "Specifically, the Supreme Court found that DNA's ability to identify the source, or a specific individual, should be significant in the decision to grant DNA testing."

Noling and Wood remain hopeful that the county court will order testing on the cigarette butt in order to compare the DNA samples to that of an alternative suspect.

Read the full article.

Read more about Noling's case.

By testing the DNA evidence still available, Mississippi could achieve two goals at the same time -- resolving Manning's claims and, if those claims are valid, finding a person responsible for the crime. The state's justices may be in no mood to listen to the Innocence Project, but if they are they will hear something insightful about the way these cases unfold. "Simply put," the Innocence Project argued this week, "just because it's hard to imagine a scenario where DNA testing could exonerate Willie Manning doesn't mean there isn't one."

In 48% of the 306 DNA exoneration cases, the real perpetrator was identified through a DNA match.

Urge Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant to stay the execution and allow Manning to do the DNA testing.

Read the full article.

Read about cases of people exonerated through DNA testing after serving time on death row.

"I feel like I've been dropped onto another planet - everything has changed, and everything that I've known is gone,'' said Ranta.

...

"The first time I ate at a restaurant and used their restroom, I couldn't figure out how to use the sink; it was one of those automatic motion-sensor faucets,'' Ranta told The Post. "I had to get someone to show me what to do, and I felt embarrassed."

Out of prison for just one day, Ranta's celebration of freedom came to a halt when he suffered a heart attack.

"The doctors have said that the stress of being innocent and imprisoned for decades, combined with not being able to eat a fresh fruit or vegetable for 22 years, can do that to a heart,'' Ranta said.

Today, Ranta says he is doing much better and will file a lawsuit against the city claiming malicious prosecution and wrongful imprisonment. He is looking toward the future.

"It's going to take a long time for me to feel normal again, if I even remember what normal is,'' he said.

...

"Once I'm fully on my feet, I'd like to work with other falsely convicted individuals to help them transition into society," he said. "Unfortunately, there are a lot of people like me out there."

Read the full article.

Read more about Ranta's case.

In a request filed Friday, Manning's attorneys said the Supreme Court overlooked or misunderstood some matters raised in Manning's motion for DNA and other forensic testing... Four justices on Thursday sided with Manning.

Justice Leslie King found particular fault with the prosecution's handling of hairs found in Miller's car. King said court records show an analysis of the hairs revealed they were from a black person. King said prosecutors told the jury the hairs were from a black person, Manning is black and because he is black Manning killed the two white students.

"Should a DNA test demonstrate that the African-American hairs found in Miller's car did not belong to Manning, then the infirmity in the prosecution's emphasis on the importance of the evidence would be exposed. And it would certainly raise reasonable questions regarding Manning's guilt," King said.

DNA testing can provide definitive proof of guilt or innocence. As the dissenters on the Mississippi Supreme Court noted, it could also identify the person responsible for the crime. Testing in this case will provide surety that Mississippi is not committing a travesty of justice by executing an innocent man.

Please take action and ask the Governor of Mississippi to stay the execution of Willie Manning and order DNA testing of the evidence in his case.

Read the AP story.

"In some of these cases, I have actually had judges declare my clients innocent, and yet they are still sitting in prison," said project director Justin Brooks.

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"Each one is a different reason, but there is one common theme and that is an innocent person who has been wrongfully convicted," he said.

California exonerees Ken Marsh and Brian Banks will be joining parts of the march in the coming weeks. Banks made headlines earlier this month when he became the first exoneree to sign a professional contract with the NFL.

Read the full article and watch coverage from CBS8 San Diego.

Watch more about the California Innocence Project 600 Mile March.

What I didn't know then was that this wrongful death sentence was only part of the torture I would experience for the next 18 1/2 years. I didn't know that I would be forced to live in an 8-foot, by 12-foot cage. I didn't know I would have to use a steel toilet, connected to my steel sink, in plain view of the male and female corrections officers who would walk the runs in front of my cell. I didn't know that for years on end I would have no physical contact with a single human being.
I didn't know that guards would feed me like a dog, through a slot in my door. Instead of providing basic nutrients, the food sometimes contained rat feces, broken glass or the sweat of the inmate who cooked it. This diet caused me health problems that continue today.
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If you believe in the death penalty, I hope you would at least agree that some of us - the innocent ones and ones unlawfully sentenced to die - did not deserve this torture. Even if you believe in the death penalty, these torturous conditions make no sense. They damaged guys so much they could not repent for their crimes. Guys could not focus on the wrong they had done when they had a legitimate complaint of being tortured in administrative segregation by the state of Texas. And the torture was unnecessary.
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I lived through solitary and I know there is a better way. These bills should become law because solitary is simply a tool to break a man's spirit - it doesn't make him better or our communities safer.

For Karen Daniel and Jeff Urdangen with the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law, the innocence petitions ends more than a decade of legal wrangling on Beaman's behalf.

The evidence at Beaman's trial that he drove 140 miles each way from Rockford to Bloomington at high speeds to kill Lockmiller and return home before his mother could detect his absence fell far short of what was needed to convict Beaman, said Daniel.

"He was expected to prove he wasn't and couldn't have been in Normal at the time of the murder. There was simply no evidence," said Daniel, adding that the state's closing remarks at the trial comparing Beaman to Adolf Hitler were "out of control."