GIST: "A California man who has spent 25 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit was exonerated and ordered released by a judge on Thursday after prosecutors agreed he had been wrongly convicted.
Miguel Solorio, 44, was arrested in 1998 for a fatal drive-by shooting in Whittier, southeast of Los Angeles, and eventually sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Superior Court Judge William Ryan overturned Solorio’s conviction during a Los Angeles court hearing that Solorio attended remotely.
When the hearing concluded, Solorio thanked his attorneys with the Northern California Innocence Project, calling them his “dream team.”
“It’s like a dream I don’t want to wake up from,” he said. “This day finally came.”
The attorneys who petitioned for Solorio’s release argued that his conviction was based on faulty eyewitness identification practices.
In a letter last month, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office said it had “confidently and definitively” concluded that Solorio is entitled to be released.
His attorneys said the case against Solorio relied heavily on a now-debunked method of identifying a suspect that results in contaminating the witnesses’ memory by repeatedly showing photos of the same person over and over.
In Solorio’s case, before it was in the news four eyewitnesses shown his photo did not identify him as the suspect, and some even pointed to a different person.
But rather than pursue other leads, law enforcement continued to present the witnesses with photos of Solorio until some of them eventually identified him, his lawyers said.
“This case is a tragic example of what happens when law enforcement officials develop tunnel vision in their pursuit of a suspect,” said Sarah Pace, an attorney with the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law.
“Once a witness mentioned Solorio’s name, law enforcement officers zeroed in on only him, disregarding other evidence and possible suspects, and putting their own judgment about guilt or innocence above the facts.”
The district attorney’s letter noted that “new documentable scientific consensus emerged in 2020 that a witness’s memory for a suspect should be tested only once, as even the test itself contaminates the witness’s memory.”
The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has up to five days to process Solorio’s release from Mule Creek State Prison southeast of Sacramento."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
