"Alabama is tied for seventh among states with the most defendants
exonerated of crimes in 2015, according to a report from the National
Registry of Exonerations released today. The report,
"Exonerations in 2015,"
states that there were 149 people exonerated last year, which is the
most since the group began tracking exonerations in the late 1980s. That
also includes a record of 58 defendants exonerated in homicide, or more
than one a week, according to the group. Of the 58, five were on Death Row. That includes Anthony Ray Hinton in Alabama. Texas led the nation with 54 exonerations, followed by New York with
17, Illinois, 13, Alaska, 6, North Carolina and California with five
each, and Alabama , Connecticut and Wisconsin with four each. Florida,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia had three exonerations each. Six states had
two exonerations each and a dozen had one each. The federal system had
three exonerations and Guam had one. "Increasingly, prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys are
acknowledging the systemic problem of wrongful convictions," Michigan
Law Professor Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of
Exonerations and the author of the report stated in a press release.
"That's a welcome change," Gross said, "but it's just a start. We've
only begun to address this problem systematically." Gross said in an interview with AL.com most of the information for
the report came from news accounts, interviews with lawyers and
prosecutors, and court records. The four men exonerated in Alabama are: Hinton, Beniah Alton Dandridge, Evan Lee Deakle, and Frank Sealie.
Beniah Alton Dandridge spent 20 years in prison
for a murder before his exoneration and release in October. Dandridge
was released after a fingerprint match that led to his conviction turned
out to be wrong..........Dandridge was convicted of intentional murder in the 1994 slaying of
71-year-old Riley Manning of Montgomery. Dandridge was sentenced to life
in prison in 1996. Investigators said fingerprints in blood found on a bathroom wall at
the crime scene matched Dandridge. But a few days after the murder,
another man, David Sudduth, driving Manning's truck was arrested by
Florida police. Sudduth later pleaded guilty to capital murder and is
serving life without parole. Sudduth implicated Dandridge in the crime, but would later, after
Dandridge's conviction, give a sworn statement saying that Dandridge was
not involved. Besides the fingerprints, prosecutors relied on a
jailhouse informant who testified against Dandridge but later admitted
he lied in exchange for a lighter sentence for a pending felony charge.........
Anthony Ray Hinton was freed
from Alabama Death Row in April 2015 after prosecutors retested the gun
in his capital murder case. Hinton had won a retrial because the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled his trial attorney could have hired a better
firearms expert than the visually impaired civil engineer who had
testified on Hinton's behalf. .........Prosecutors
told a judge they wouldn't re-try Hinton for the 1985
slayings of two fast-food managers because the new testing couldn't
match crime scene bullets to .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver
found in Hinton's house. Hinton had been convicted and sentenced to
death for the Feb. 25,
1985 shooting death of John Davidson, an assistant manager at a
Southside Mrs. Winner's, who was forced into the restaurant's cooler and
shot twice in the head. He also was convicted in the July 2, 1985 death
of 25-year-old Thomas Vason, an assistant manager at a Captain D's in
Woodlawn, who was forced into a cooler and shot twice in the head. The
conviction was based largely on the prosecution's gun experts and
the eyewitness testimony of a surviving restaurant manager in a July
26, 1985 shooting and robbery of a Bessemer Quincy's night manager.
But Equal Justice Initiative argued in
its motion for dismissal that Hinton had a "powerful alibi" for that
night, with co-workers confirming he was at work 15 miles away at the
time. Hinton was not tried for the Quincy's shooting.........The report
states that 27 exonerations in 2015 were for convictions
based on false confessions - more than 80 percent in homicide cases,
mostly by defendants who were under 18 or had intellectual disabilities
or both, according to the report. Three-quarters of the homicide
exonerations included known official misconduct, such as concealing
evidence of the real criminals or allowing witnesses to testify falsely,
according to the report. More than two-thirds of the defendants
exonerated in homicide cases
were people of color, including half who were African American,
according to the report."
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/02/alabama_tied_for_7th_in_exoner.html
Read the actual report at the following link:
http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exonerations_in_2015.pdf
See Hamilton Spectator story: "More people were exonerated in 2015 Than in any other year."..."A remarkable number of these cases occurred
in just one place: Harris County, Texas, home to Houston. More than a
quarter of all exonerations last year involved people in Harris County
who had pleaded guilty to drug possession, only to be cleared last year. The registry's report described how the
Harris County District Attorney's Office had investigated cases after
noticing a number of people who pleaded guilty to possessing illegal
drugs, only for a crime lab — sometimes months or years later — to
reveal that the materials these people had were not drugs after all.
Some of the people who wound up pleading guilty likely agreed to plea
bargains to avoid long prison terms, the report noted."
http://www.thespec.com/news-story/6260840-more-people-were-exonerated-in-2015-in-the-u-s-than-any-other-year/