Countdown to Wrongful Conviction Day: Friday, October 2, 2105; 29 days. For information: http://www.aidwyc.org/wcd-2015/
"Lakisha Ward-Green spent three months in jail after she lost control of
her Chevrolet Cobalt, killing her teenage passenger. Last week, a
Pennsylvania judge, citing “newly discovered evidence”
erased her guilty plea. The new evidence: the February 2014 recall by
General Motors Co. of 2.6 million cars for defective ignition switches.
Ward-Green, now 25, is part of a small but growing group of people
caught in a Kafkaesque legal web stemming from the safety scandals that
have rocked GM and other automakers. Often blamed for unexplained
accidents and sometimes charged with serious crimes, they can wait years
before learning the role played by undisclosed defects. With a record
64 million vehicles recalled in the U.S. last year,
many of them after being on the road for a decade or more, experts
expect an increasing number of proceedings over wrongful convictions to
emerge. An examination of court filings has identified at least four
such challenges in the case of GM’s recall and one in the case of
Toyota. “When defendants claimed their cars shut off or sped up all by
themselves, the claims seemed too far out to create a doubt that was
reasonable. Now we know better,” said University of Michigan law
professor Erik Gordon. In the case of GM’s defective ignition switch,
the company knew of
the problem for about a decade before it issued a public notice. “Just
about everyone who is in jail in a case where there wasn’t
clear evidence of driving under the influence or another wrongful act
will try to get out using the ‘ignition switch made me do it’ defense,”
Gordon said in an e-mail.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/old-convictions-new-questions-as-car-flaws-raise-doubts "Lakisha Ward-Green spent three months in jail after she lost control of
her Chevrolet Cobalt, killing her teenage passenger. Last week, a
Pennsylvania judge, citing “newly discovered evidence”
erased her guilty plea. The new evidence: the February 2014 recall by
General Motors Co. of 2.6 million cars for defective ignition switches.
Ward-Green, now 25, is part of a small but growing group of people
caught in a Kafkaesque legal web stemming from the safety scandals that
have rocked GM and other automakers. Often blamed for unexplained
accidents and sometimes charged with serious crimes, they can wait years
before learning the role played by undisclosed defects. With a record
64 million vehicles recalled in the U.S. last year,
many of them after being on the road for a decade or more, experts
expect an increasing number of proceedings over wrongful convictions to
emerge. An examination of court filings has identified at least four
such challenges in the case of GM’s recall and one in the case of
Toyota. “When defendants claimed their cars shut off or sped up all by
themselves, the claims seemed too far out to create a doubt that was
reasonable. Now we know better,” said University of Michigan law
professor Erik Gordon. In the case of GM’s defective ignition switch,
the company knew of
the problem for about a decade before it issued a public notice. “Just
about everyone who is in jail in a case where there wasn’t
clear evidence of driving under the influence or another wrongful act
will try to get out using the ‘ignition switch made me do it’ defense,”
Gordon said in an e-mail.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/old-convictions-new-questions-as-car-flaws-raise-doubt