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Other Convicted InnocentsMost of the cases presented below are reproduced from the Web Site of the Innocence Project (www.innocenceproject.org) Of 123 post conviction exonerations at that web site, 33 involved false confessions or admissions. 37 of the 123 involved homicides. For more information about the tragedy, enormity and shocking frequency of convictions of the innocent in the U.S., see the Web site of Truth In Justice, a non-profit organization. (www.truthinjustice.org)Another good source is an April, 2004 study from the University of Michigan of 328 single exonerations (not counting those caused by serial rogue police) from 1989 through 2003. It's "Exonerations in the United States 1989 through 2003" by Professor Samuel Gross and Ph.d or J.D. candidates: Kristen Jacoby, Daniel Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery and Sujata Patil. Another web site with a database of 300 cases of convicted, but innocent people, is at www.dredumndhiggins.com In that database are TWO cases of innocent MAINE citizens being convicted of serious crimes. Some in Maine may think that "it cannot happen here," because we are different from Texas, Florida, Illinois and New York. The selected cases below came from states for which Mainers may feel a greater affinity: Connecticut (1), Idaho(1), Massachusetts (5), Virginia (5) and Wisconsin (2). For those states, these are ALL of their cases. At the end are cases from Maryland (1) and South Carolina (1) which are presented only because they involved the murder of girls. Each of the cases contains at least one aspect which has an uncanny resemblance to the case of Dennis Dechaine. At the bottom of this list is a link to parallel information for Dennis Dechaine, but which was created for this site, and is not from the Innocence Project - not until he is found innocent.
See, for example, the case of Steven Linscott.Here is a brief summary:Steven Linscott was wrongfully convicted in 1982 of the murder of a young neighbor woman in Oak Park, Illinois, as a result of prosecutorial and police misconduct and misleading forensic testimony. After the body of the victim, Karen Ann Phillips, was found, Linscott approached Oak Park police at the urging of friends and told them about a dream he had about a similar murder. Although there were relatively few and not-at-all-amazing similarities between the dream and the actual crime, authorities called Linscott's statement a confession and charged him with murder and rape. At trial, Assistant Cook County State's Attorneys John E. Morrissey and Jay C. Magnuson told the jury that biological material recovered from the scene had to have come from an O secretor, a relatively small population group that included Linscott. In fact, the forensic evidence established that the material in question could have come not only from an O secretor but also a non-secretor of any blood type — a group that included a sizeable majority of the population. A state forensic witness, Mohammad Tahir, also had testified that several hairs found on the victim's body, bed, and carpet were consistent with hair samples provided by Linscott. In recent years, microscopic hair comparisons have been shown to be useless. After the Illinois Appellate Court reversed the conviction based on prosecutorial misconduct — saying that Morrissey and Magnuson had “invented” the inculpatory blood evidence — the Cook County State's Attorney's Office agreed to DNA testing, which led to Linscott's exoneration in 1992. In December 2002, Linscott received a pardon based on innocence from Illinois Governor George H. Ryan. |
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