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One year of freedom for Georgia exoneree
Posted: February 14, 2008 12:07 pm
This week marks the one-year anniversary of Willie "Pete" Williams' exoneration in Georgia. He was convicted based on eyewitness misidentification in 1985 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was exonerated on February 13, 2007 by postconviction DNA testing after serving nearly 22 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.
Read more about Willie “Pete” Williams' case here.
Read yesterday’s blog post on eyewitness identification reforms in Georgia.
Other exoneration anniversary this week:
Thursday: Bruce Godschalk (Served 14.5 Years, Exonerated 2/14/02)
Tags: Bruce Godschalk, Willie Williams, Eyewitness Identification
Seven Years Free and Speaking Out
Posted: February 10, 2009 4:09 pm
It was seven years ago Saturday when Bruce Godschalk walked out of a Pennsylvania prison, finally free after serving nearly 15 years for a rape that DNA proves he didn’t commit. After a composite sketch led police to identify Godschalk as a suspect in a 1986 rape, they interrogated him for hours on end. The interview ended with an audiotaped confessions from Godschalk, including facts about the crime not know to the public.
Later, Godschalk would say that the facts were fed to him during the interview, and that he simply repeated information from police in order to get the interrogation to end. Godschalk fought for several years for DNA testing that could prove his innocence. When he finally obtained testing with the help of the Innocence Project in 2001, police said they had already sent evidence to a lab without the consent of the Innocence Project, that the tests had consumed all of the available evidence, and that the results were inconclusive. This was not true, however, and biological evidence that had previously been declared lost was turned over by police to the crime lab. The results proved Godschalk’s innocence and he was freed.
Since his release, Godschalk has been active in working to promote criminal justice reforms around the country. Late last year, he joined Innocence Project Policy Analyst Rebecca Brown at the National Youth Leadership Forum conference.Other exoneration anniversaries this week:
Sunday: Anthony Gray, Maryland (Served 7 Years, Exonerated 1999)
Monday: Donte Booker, Ohio (Served 15 Years, Exonerated 2005)
Lesly Jean, North Carolina (Served 9 Years, Exonerated 2001)
Tags: Donte Booker, Bruce Godschalk, David A. Gray, Lesly Jean
Ted Stevens and Prosecutorial Misconduct
Posted: April 3, 2009 2:48 pm
An op-ed in today’s New York Times examines the alleged prosecutorial misconduct in the case against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and asserts that the problem of prosecutorial misconduct is widespread – and unnoticed – in the U.S.
In the piece, “Prosecutors Gone Wild,” former New Jersey Attorney General John Farmer writes that prosecutors have overstepped their role in countless cases across the country, seeking convictions rather than justice. The U.S. government was right in seeking to dismiss charges against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, he writes, but the Stevens case “did not occur in a vacuum.”
Prosecutorial misconduct takes many forms, from failing to disclose critical evidence to disclosing information illegally to the press to overreaching in the exercise of the prosecutor’s discretion. Underlying all of them is a frightening misconception of the role of the prosecutor.Prosecutorial misconduct has played a role in many of the 235 wrongful convictions later overturned through DNA testing, through a range of misconduct including hiding exculpatory evidence or exaggerating the value of evidence.
That role is not to seek the maximum penalty at every turn, nor to put together an impressive statistical tally of convictions. It is not to use the emotional pain and personal ruin involved on all sides of a criminal case to advance one’s own career or personal agenda. Prosecutors do not even share the duty defense lawyers have of providing zealous representation. The prosecutor’s only duty is to seek justice. Period.
This duty is especially important in an age like ours, when the integrity of the criminal justice process is so frequently called into question. Read the full article here. (The New York Times 04/03/09)
In the case of Curtis McCarty in Oklahoma, prosecutors intentionally misled jurors and relied on falsified forensic evidence to convict an innocent man of murder, leading to a death sentence. McCarty was exonerated in 2007 after serving 21 years in prison – including 19 on death row.
Prosecutors also committed misconduct in the case of Bruce Godschalk, who spent more than 14 years in Pennsylvania prison for a rape he didn’t commit. When the Innocence Project requested DNA testing after Godschalk had served 13 years in prison, prosecutors said they had secretly sent the evidence for testing and received an inconclusive result. Additionally, they said the tests had destroyed the evidence. A missing piece of evidence would then later mysteriously surface, and DNA testing freed Godschalk.
These cases – and others like them – are proof that when prosecutorial misconduct occurs, justice cannot.
Tags: Bruce Godschalk, Curtis McCarty, Government Misconduct