Rodney Roberts was arrested in 1996 in Newark, New Jersey, 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. Mr. Roberts had a good job and had recently moved with his young son into a new apartment. Hoping to get back to his son as soon as possible, Rodney Roberts pleaded guilty to the crime in exchange for a seven-year sentence. He would end up spending 18 years in custody before DNA evidence excluded him as a perpetrator and he was exonerated and released in 2014.
Please link to Rodney’s gofundme:
https://www.gofundme.com/rodney-roberts-foundation
https://www.facebook.com/groups/575988949170442/
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 penis amputated. It was found among the trash nearby. Despite a crime scene rich with potential evidence, Las Vegas detectives Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle ignored obvious leads and instead focused their investigation on 18-year-old Blaise Lobato, based solely on a third-hand rumor. Ms. Lobato became a suspect because of an attack she fended off in Las Vegas in May 2001. A man attempted to rape her, and she fought him off with a knife, slashing him in the groin area before escaping in her car. In July, police drove up to the small town of Panaca to interview Ms. Lobato about the incident. On the day of the crime, she was at home with her parents in Panaca, which was nearly three hours northeast of Las Vegas near the Utah state line. She was forthcoming with police and described an incident entirely different from Bailey’s murder. When the police told her that the man had died, she mistakenly believed it was the same man that had attacked her, and she expressed remorse, which the police took to be a confession. Even though there was not a shred of physical evidence linking Blaise Lobato to the crime scene, on May 18, 2002, she was convicted of first degree murder and sexual penetration of a dead body and sentenced to 40 to 100 years. The state’s theory of the crime fell apart in October 2017, when Vanessa Potkin, Director of Post-Conviction Litigation at the Innocence Project, and a team of attorneys presented nearly a week’s worth of testimony from several renowned entomologists and a medical examiner, each of whom demonstrated why the state’s narrative never made any scientific sense. On December 19, 2017, the judge vacated Ms. Lobato’s conviction and ordered a new trial. The grounds were inadequate legal defense for failing to call an expert to challenge the time of death, given that it was such a pivotal issue. Ten days later, the prosecution dropped all charges, and Blaise Lobato was freed after serving almost 16 years on prison. In this episode she is joined by two of her Innocence Project attorneys, Jane Putcher & Adnan Salter.
Please link to Blaise's gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/kirstinlobatolibertyfund
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 Mr. Huffington of first-degree murder in the deaths of Diane Becker and Joseph Hudson. The first trial, in 1981, occurred in Caroline County and Mr. Huffington was later granted a new trial due to evidence improperly introduced by the State. The second trial took place in Frederick County in 1983. He faced the death penalty after both convictions, but his sentence was later commuted to two life terms in prison. Since his first trial, Mr. Huffington had filed multiple appeals at the state and federal levels, challenging the state’s case against him. In 2013, as the result of newly discovered DNA evidence that demonstrated that hairs discovered at the crime scene were not Mr. Huffington's, the Circuit Court for Frederick County, MD, granted him a Writ of Actual Innocence and vacated his murder convictions, and John Huffington was released from prison on bond. The faulty evidence came from an FBI lab that has been forced to acknowledge widespread mismanagement and false testimony. The Washington Post published an article in 2015 that “[t]he Justice Department and FBI…formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.” Flawed forensic testimony was given in 257 of the 268 trials in which hair evidence was used, and John Huffington’s trial was one of them. Since his release from prison, Mr. Huffington has been a tireless advocate for the re-entry community, and his work has been recognized by Baltimore City leaders, including State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. He is now serving as the Director of Workforce Development for Living Classrooms Foundation, where he manages the workforce development department and its programming with 18 staff members and a $2 million budget. As part of his role, he manages Project SERVE, the same job-training program in which he enrolled upon being released from incarceration.
Instagram @huffingtonjohn
Twitter @huffingtonjohn
Please also link to the foundation where he works: https://livingclassrooms.org/
Malcolm Alexander: An Innocent Man, A One Day Trial and 38 Years in Prison - A Tragic Miscarriage of JusticeMalcolm Alexander was wrongfully convicted for a 1979 rape in Gretna, Louisiana 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. Mr. Alexander, who is black, told police that the sex occurred after he gave the woman money and that it was consensual. This encounter, which was uncorroborated and later dropped, prompted police to place Mr. Alexander’s photo in an array that was shown to the 1979 rape victim over four months after she was attacked at gunpoint by a complete stranger. The assailant was behind the victim for the entirety of the crime, and her opportunity to view him was extremely limited. According to police reports, the victim “tentatively” selected Malcolm Alexander’s photo. Yet, police conducted a physical line-up three days later that included Mr. Alexander, who was the only person from the photo array who was shown again to the victim in the physical line-up. Again, the victim made a “possible” identification and the word “tentative” was written next to Mr. Alexander’s line-up number. However, when the original detective returned later that day to record a statement from the victim, the victim’s confidence was recorded as 98% sure that Mr. Alexander was the assailant. Malcolm Alexander was arrested and charged with aggravated rape and he went to trial on November 5, 1980. The entire trial—from selection of the jury until the jury’s guilty verdict—lasted one day, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Mr. Alexander’s paid attorney, who was subsequently disbarred, failed to make court appearances and to file important pleadings, including a motion challenging the identification. The Innocence Project first took up Mr. Alexander’s case in 1996 but quickly learned that the rape kit and a semen-stained towel had been destroyed only four years after his conviction. In 2013, new hair evidence recovered from the crime scene was found at the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab. The tests showed that all three hairs came from the same person, and Malcolm Alexander was excluded as the source of the hairs. On January 30, 2018, absolved of the crime thanks to DNA evidence, Malcolm Alexander walked free from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after serving 38 years. He is joined by his son Malcolm Jr. and Innocence Project's Director of Post-Conviction Litigation, Vanessa Potkin, in this episode.
" ["episode_id"]=> string(36) "79edf75f-0fac-4031-b38f-ae9589d26dda" ["show_id"]=> NULL ["episode_audio"]=> string(70) "http://rss.art19.com/episodes/79edf75f-0fac-4031-b38f-ae9589d26dda.mp3" } [4]=> array(6) { ["title"]=> string(89) "S5E4: An Unforgettable Story of Mistaken Identity, Grave Injustice, Forgiveness and Grace" ["datetime"]=> string(14) "March 26, 2018" ["description"]=> string(2314) "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 Cotton as her attacker in a photo lineup. Soon after, she chose him again in a live lineup – she was 100% sure she had the right man. In January 1985, Ronald Cotton was convicted by a jury of one count of rape and one count of burglary. In a second trial, in November 1987, Mr. Cotton was convicted of both rapes and two counts of burglary. He was sentenced to life in prison plus fifty-four years. Mr. Cotton was unsuccessful overturning his conviction in several appeals, but in the spring of 1995, his case was given a major break: the Burlington Police Department turned over all evidence, which included the assailant’s semen for DNA testing, to the defense. When the DNA test results were reported in May 1995, the district attorney and the defense motioned to dismiss all charges. On June 30, 1995, Ronald Cotton was officially cleared of all charges and released from prison after serving 10.5 years. In July 1995, the governor of North Carolina officially pardoned him. Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton met for the first time after his exoneration and immediately became good friends. They travel around the country working to spread the word about wrongful convictions and reforms – especially for eyewitness identification procedures – that can prevent future injustice.
FB: Healing Justice
Instagram: Healing_Justice
Twitter: @Healing_Justice
And link to her website: www.healingjusticeproject.org
Read "Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption" available on Amazon.
From the moment he was charged with rape and robbery in 1989, Leroy Harris has insisted on his innocence. Even after his conviction — for which he was sentenced to 80 years in prison — he fought the verdict through five appeals. Mr. Harris finally got the Innocence Project of New York working on his case in 2012. The Innocence Project had the Connecticut forensic lab test new DNA evidence which excluded Mr. Harris from the male DNA on the inside of one victim’s blouse. The sexual assault charge against Mr. Harris was dismissed, but in order to be released, Leroy Harris agreed to enter “Alford” pleas to the remaining charges in exchange for his freedom. He spent almost 30 years in prison in Connecticut for first-degree sexual assault and three counts of first-degree robbery that new evidence—including exculpatory DNA testing results and serious prosecutorial misconduct—strongly suggests he didn’t commit.
Larry was forced into taking a plea and cannot sue, so no compensation at all for him - even after decades in prison. Please share Leroy’s razoo link:
https://www.razoo.com/story/Leroyharris
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom
About the Show
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom is a podcast about tragedy, triumph, unequal justice and actual innocence. Based on the files of the lawyers who freed them, Wrongful Conviction features interviews with men and women who have spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit – some of them had even been sentenced to death. These are their stories.
Recent Episodes
Jason Flom
Jason Flom is the CEO of Lava Records and Lava Music Publishing. Flom previously served as Chairman and CEO at Atlantic Records, Virgin Records, and Capitol Music Group and is personally responsible for launching acts such as Kid Rock, Katy Perry, and Lorde. He is a nationally recognized philanthropist and an expert on criminal justice issues. Flom is a founding board member of the Innocence Project and serves on the boards of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, The Drug Policy Alliance, The Legal Action Center, the NYU Prison Education Program, and VetPaw.