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Arvin McGee marks six years of freedom
Posted: February 26, 2008 2:10 pm
Today is the sixth anniversary of Arvin McGee’s exoneration in Oklahoma. McGee served more than 12 years in prison for a brutal rape he didn’t commit. In 1989, two years after the crime, McGee was convicted and sentenced to more than 200 years in prison.
McGee’s conviction rested primarily on the victim’s eyewitness testimony. The victim identified McGee from a photo array four months after the crime took place. Eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing.
Read more about eyewitness misidentification here.
McGee’s case was eventually taken by the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, which secured DNA testing of the evidence. The results conclusively excluded McGee from the crime and he was exonerated and freed from prison in February 2002, after serving more than 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
During the same year of McGee’s exoneration, Oklahoma officials revealed that the DNA evidence gathered from the crime scene implicated another man, Edward Alberty, in the crime. Alberty was already serving time for another crime.
Read more about Arvin McGee’s case here.
Tags: Arvin McGee
Eight Years of Freedom
Posted: February 24, 2010 5:40 pm
Eight years ago this week, Arvin McGee was exonerated through DNA testing after spending more than 12 years in Oklahoma prisons for a crime he didn’t commit. After his release, he would fight the city of Tulsa in court for years before settling a civil suit. One city councilman would later write that his case was “flubbed from beginning to end” at an enormous cost to McGee and to taxpayers.
McGee was charged with the 1987 rape despite inconsistencies in the evidence against him. The victim’s description of the perpetrator differed significantly from McGee’s appearance, and she picked a different man in the first photographic lineup. At a second lineup almost four months after the crime, she took almost 15 minutes to identify McGee.
Significantly, McGee was suffering from an injury that rendered him physically unable to commit the crime. The victim had been carried over the perpetrator’s shoulder, but McGee was awaiting surgery for a hernia operation, and it was extremely unlikely that he would have been able to carry the victim. Eyewitness misidentification is the single most common cause of wrongful convictions.
Despite these issues, McGee was charged with the crime, based mainly on the second identification. He would be tried three times before he was ultimately convicted of rape, kidnapping and forcible sodomy and sentenced to over 200 years in prison. The first trial ended in a mistrial, and the second in a hung jury.
McGee spent almost 13 years in prison before the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System took his case and arranged for DNA testing on the remaining biological evidence. These tests excluded McGee. A second round of testing ordered by Tulsa County prosecutors on the rape kit recovered from the victim produced the same results, which implicated another Oklahoma prisoner. The other man was charged with the crime, but his case was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.
Due to the conclusive evidence of McGee’s innocence, Tulsa prosecutors joined with his attorneys in seeking his release. McGee, who was 27 years old when he was wrongfully convicted, was 39 on the day he was freed in February 2002.
Read more about McGee’s case and the role of eyewitness misidentification in causing wrongful convictions.
Other Exoneree Anniversaries This Week:
Charles Chatman, Texas (Served 26.5 years, Exonerated: 2/26/08)
Tags: Arvin McGee