Wrongful Conviction

De’Marchoe Carpenter and Malcolm Scott were 17 years old when Tulsa police arrested them in connection to a gang-related shooting that killed 19-year-old Karen Summers, the mother of a 4-month-old baby, outside a house party in 1994. Neither teen was found with the murder weapon or the getaway car and no DNA linked either of them to the crime scene. Days after the murder occurred, a Tulsa ho...

In 1998, Peter Ouko was taken to Kamiti Maximum Prison in Kenya and was sentenced to death in 2001. His sentence would later be commuted to life imprisonment by Kenya’s former President Mwai Kibaki in 2009. Instead of bitterness, Mr. Ouko decided to forgive his tormentors and make the best of his time in prison, becoming the first inmate to graduate with a University of London Diploma in Law...

In March 1988, Steven Barnes was arrested and charged with the rape, sodomy, and murder of 16-year-old Kimberly Simon in upstate New York. He was tried by a jury in Utica beginning on May 15, 1989. Questionable eyewitness identifications and three forms of unvalidated forensic science were used against Steven at trial, and he was convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in pr...

Calvin Buari served 22 years for a double murder in the Bronx, even though someone else confessed to the crime. In the early 1990s, Calvin Buari was a well-known crack cocaine distributor in the Bronx, and authorities blamed him for a spasm of bloodshed there; the press reported that he practiced "black magic" and was a murderous thug. In 1992, a disgruntled drug associate who had recently shot Ca...

Andre Hatchett spent half of his life in prison for a murder he did not commit largely due to inadequate defense, a single unreliable witness, and exculpatory evidence that was not disclosed to the defense. He was the 19th person to be exonerated under Brooklyn D.A. Ken Thompson's Conviction Integrity Unit. Andre Hatchett is joined by Senior Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project Seema Saifee and...

Angel Cordero was convicted in 1999 of attempted murder and robbery of then-Boston University freshman Jason Mercado, who was attacked and stabbed by strangers while walking in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. Four plainclothes Bronx Gang Unit cops driving by the scene observed the tail end of the assault and quickly arrested five men out of the crowd, including Angel Cordero, who at age 26 h...

In December 1979, a triple murder shook the small town of St. Albans, WV. John Moss III was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison, and he has since served 38 years for this crime that he did not commit. Jason Flom teams up with Georgetown University Professor of Government and Law, Marc Howard, and his student, Jessica Scoratow, to interview John Moss from behind bars in West Virginia...

Rodney Roberts was arrested in 1996 in Newark, NJ, after an altercation with a friend. After several days in custody, he found himself charged with the kidnapping and rape of a 17-year-old girl. His court appointed attorney advised him to plead guilty or spend the rest of his life in prison. Rodney had a good job and had recently moved with his young son into a new apartment. Hoping to get back to...

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...