Wrongful Conviction

Kirstin Blaise Lobato was twice convicted of the gruesome murder of a 44-year-old homeless man named Duran Bailey, whose body was found behind a dumpster off the Las Vegas Strip just after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2001, covered in a thin layer of trash. Bailey’s teeth had been knocked out, and his eyes were bloodied and swollen shut; his carotid artery had been slashed, his rectum stabbed, and his...

John Huffington spent 32 years in the Maryland Prison System—10 of which were on death row—after being wrongfully convicted of a 1981 double murder. Previously, juries twice convicted John of first-degree murder in the deaths of Diane Becker and Joseph Hudson. The first trial, in 1981, occurred in Caroline County and John was later granted a new trial due to evidence improperly introdu...

Malcolm Alexander was wrongfully convicted for a 1979 rape in Gretna, LA and spent nearly four decades incarcerated before DNA evidence proved his innocence. In February 1980, police arrested 20-year-old Malcolm Alexander after a white woman accused him of sexually assaulting her. Malcolm, who is black, told police that the sex occurred after he gave the woman money and that it was consensual. Thi...

In July 1984, an assailant broke into Jennifer Thompson-Cannino’s apartment and sexually assaulted her; later that night, the assailant broke into another apartment and sexually assaulted a second woman. Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, then a 22-year-old college student, made every effort to study the perpetrator’s face while he was assaulting her. Ms. Thompson-Cannino first chose Ronald Co...

From the moment he was charged with rape and robbery in 1989, Leroy Harris has insisted on his innocence. In May 1983, a New Haven, CT nightclub owner was robbed at gunpoint by three young men late one night. The men stole his car, and later that evening robbed and sexually assaulted two women. Leroy became one of the numerous suspects because he was misidentified. He was tried in April 1989, six...

Jimmie C. Gardner was a Charleston minor league baseball player when he was accused of sexual assault in 1987. He grew up in Tampa, FL and was drafted by the Chicago Cubs just after high school graduation, playing with them in the minor leagues for four seasons. In 1990, while working towards his business degree, Jimmie Gardner was arrested and charged with robbing and raping a woman and physicall...

In December 1999, the body of an unidentified young woman was found beaten to death in a forest preserve near North Chicago in Lake County, IL. Ten days after the body was discovered, Jeremy Tweedy, Jason Johnson and Jason Strong were brought in for questioning after Tweedy mentioned the woman's death to an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute. Police charged 24-year-old Jason Strong w...

David McCallum and Willie Stuckey were both 16 when they were convicted of forcing a 20-year-old man into his Buick Regal at gunpoint in Queens, killing him with a single gunshot to the head, then leaving his body in Bushwick, Brooklyn. After being beaten by police and coerced into confessing, David McCallum and Willie Stuckey gave brief and contradictory confessions, each pinning the homicide on...

In 1998, Vanessa Gathers was wrongfully convicted of robbing and beating 71-year-old Michael Shaw to death. There was no physical evidence linking Vanessa to the crime, and her conviction was based on a false confession extracted from her by notorious New York police detective Louis Scarcella, whose tactics led to the wrongful convictions of more than a dozen people. She is joined by her attorney...

Ronald Simpson-Bey was a jailhouse lawyer who got his conviction reversed for prosecutorial misconduct and subsequently won his freedom after serving 27 years in Michigan prison. In 1986, Ronald was convicted of assault with intent to murder and possession of a firearm and sentenced to 50 years in prison. While in prison he became familiar with the legal system and began assisting other inmates wi...

On September 12th, 1994, 17-year-old Michelle Murphy found her 15-week-old son stabbed to death in her kitchen. After being questioned without a parent or guardian present, which was prohibited under Oklahoma law, Michelle falsely confessed to the crime. Her 14-year-old neighbor William Lee testified during the preliminary hearing that he had walked around her house that evening and reportedly saw...

Noura Jackson was egregiously framed and wrongfully convicted of murdering her mother, Jennifer Jackson, in Memphis, TN in 2005. Amazingly she spent over three years in jail awaiting trial before being sentenced to 20 years and nine months in prison. No physical evidence linked Noura to the murder, and DNA testing not only excluded her as a suspect, but it also suggested that two or three differen...

In 1990, Jeffrey Deskovic was wrongfully convicted of the brutal rape and murder of his 15-year-old classmate, Angela Correa. Jeff was only 16 at the time of the crime with no prior record. Police claimed that Jeff was overly upset at the victim’s funeral and were certain they had their man. They interrogated him for over seven and a half hours, without his mother or legal counsel present. A...

On June 19th, 1995, Dusty Turner was out at a bar with some friends in Virginia Beach, VA, including his roommate and training partner, Billy Brown. Dusty Turner and Jennifer Evans were sitting in his car waiting for Evans’s friends to join them when an extremely intoxicated Billy Brown forced his way into the back seat and began insulting Evans and pulling her hair. When she tried to defend...

In 1998, Kian Khatibi was 22 years old and living in Westchester County, NY when he was wrongfully convicted of stabbing two men during a bar fight and sentenced to 7 to 14 years in prison. After eventually discovering that his brother had committed the crime, Kian successfully fought for his release from prison in 2008 and was finally exonerated in 2012. Kian Khatibi graduated with honors from Ne...

This special edition of Wrongful Conviction highlights the updates from two episodes recorded from Behind Bars. Since airing the Season 4 premiere about Lamonte McIntyre’s case, which was recorded while Lamonte was awaiting a new trial, he was finally freed on Friday, October 13th, 2017 after serving more than two decades behind bars in a Kansas correctional facility for a double murder. Sea...

Ryan Ferguson was a 17-year-old high school student when Kent Heitholt, a sportswriter for the Columbia Daily Tribune, was found beaten and strangled in Missouri. Heitholt's murder went unsolved for two years until police received a tip that a man named Charles Erickson could not remember the evening of the murder and had told a friend that he thought he may have been involved. Erickson, who had s...

Lorenzo Johnson served 22 years of a life sentence after he was framed twice for a murder that happened in Pennsylvania while he was in New York. On December 15th, 1995, Tarajay Williams was murdered outside of a bar in Harrisburg, PA. For several months after the murder, police detectives threatened Lorenzo with a murder charge unless he falsely accused a friend of committing the murder and deali...

Lucinda Hites-Clabaugh was 53 years old when she was wrongfully convicted of first-degree sexual abuse of a third grader in 2009. She was convicted despite no physical evidence, no witnesses, and a police officer’s admitted failures to follow investigative protocols. Lucinda spent over two years in prison until her conviction was overturned on July 18, 2012. https://www.wrongfulconvictionpod...

On the afternoon of April 15th, 1994, two men were sitting in a powder-blue Cadillac in the Quindaro neighborhood of Kansas City, KS. A man dressed in black ran up to the passenger side, raised a shotgun and fired four rounds in what looked like a drug-related hit, killing the two passengers Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing. Lamonte McIntyre, who was 17 at the time, was arrested and charged with two...

This special edition of Wrongful Conviction Behind Bars was recorded inside of Wende Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Buffalo, NY with Anthony DiPippo’s co-defendant, Andrew Krivak, and his attorney Professor Adele Bernhard. On November 22nd, 1995, a hunter found the remains of 12-year-old Josette Wright in a wooded area of Putnam County, NY with her hands and feet hog-tie...

Curtis Haith was beaten to death and shot outside of his home in western Pennsylvania. Police determined that the evening before Haith had attended a party in Uniontown, PA. Crystal Weimer, whose sisters hosted the party, and her cousin had driven Haith home and returned directly to the party. Crystal became the focus of the investigation after an ex-boyfriend told authorities she confessed. The c...

Brian Ferguson was a 20-year-old college student in West Virginia when he was accused in 2002 of fatally shooting a fellow classmate. Brian was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole, and he remained in prison until a committed team of pro bono lawyers won his release and exoneration for the crime in 2013. After his release, Brian returned to Washington, D.C. and soo...

In 1994, Angel Gonzalez was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for the rape and kidnapping of a woman in Waukegan, IL. On the night of the crime, Angel had been visiting his fiancé’s sister, who lived in the same apartment building as the victim. The victim’s boyfriend saw Angel leaving the parking lot that night, and she misidentified his car as the car th...

In 1981, a woman was brutally beaten, raped, robbed, and forced into the trunk of her car on the roof of a parking garage in Chicago. Two employees recognized her car as it was leaving the garage and attempted to stop the assailant from driving away, but the perpetrator escaped on foot, leaving the victim locked in the trunk. Based only on a composite drawing and description of the assailant, both...