PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’ As all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including physical violence, even physical and mental torture.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Of the four cases connected to Simon that were handled by the Michigan Innocence Clinic, all four successfully led to exonerations. And in each of those cases, Wayne County prosecutors fought to keep the men in prison, only to later dismiss the cases because of serious concerns about evidence or Simon's misconduct. Since the clinic was created, it has successfully won the release of 41 men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes. Defense attorneys say projects such as the Michigan Innocence Clinic are a godsend for inmates who have been wrongfully convicted and can't afford an attorney. "If it wasn't for the Innocence Project and the conviction integrity units, this system would be a mess," Wolfgang Mueller, an attorney who specializes in wrongful imprisonment cases, says. "If it wasn't for them, all these people would die in prison."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Given Simon's proven pattern of misconduct, prosecutors have an ethical obligation to make a sweeping review of all her cases — especially those that relied on confessions or witness statements, even if there are hundreds — according to activists, experts, exonerees, and defense attorneys. "It takes the prosecutor and/or the chief of police to say, 'We have an officer who was involved in a pattern of misconduct known to produce wrongful convictions, so we are going to look at all of them,'" Moran says. "Preferably you want to have an outside entity, like a prestigious law firm, to look at all these cases. The problem with doing it internally is there is pressure to preserve as many of these convictions as you can." Part of the problem, activists and defense attorneys say, is that exonerations lead to pricey lawsuits, so cities and prosecutors are often hesitant or unwilling to take actions that will lead to convictions being overturned. Similar reviews have taken place in other cities where police were accused of obtaining illegal confessions. In April 2002, a judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate decades-old allegations that disgraced Chicago Detective Jon Burge tortured suspects to obtain confessions. A total of 60 cases were reviewed, leading to multiple exonerations and pardons for death row inmates."
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In Part II of our investigation, we explore the impact on the victims of Simon's misconduct. Some are still in prison; others are still fighting for freedom. Now they want justice and are calling on prosecutors to review all of Simon's cases.
‘Falling on deaf ears’
One of the most alarming complaints about Simon was her treatment of witnesses. Numerous people have alleged she threatened to charge them with a crime if they didn't implicate a suspect she had in mind.
Deonte Howard believes he's still in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit because Simon intimidated and threatened witnesses who testified at his trial.
In April 2010, Simon and other detectives were scrambling to figure out who shot 19-year-old Tyrone Simpson in front of a convenience store on Tireman Street.
The sound of an argument caught the attention of the store's owner, Bobby Bailey, who went outside to see what was going on. He saw eight to 10 people arguing when the sound of gunshots startled him. He ran back into the store but didn't see who pulled the trigger, Bailey said in an affidavit obtained by a private investigator in June 2021.
On the day of the shooting, Bailey told police he didn't know who fired the weapon. Then a day or two later, Simon walked into his store with three other cops and a crew from the television show, The First 48.
Combative and confrontational, Simon told Bailey that he would be charged if he didn't identify Howard as the shooter, according to the affidavit. At the time, Bailey was on probation for a drug-related conviction.
"Detective Simon was very aggressive toward me," Bailey said. "She used my criminal history against me and threatened to catch me on another case if I didn't cooperate with her. At the time, I was on probation for a narcotics related conviction. Detective Simon showed me a picture of Deonte Howard and said, 'I know you know that he did it.'"
He added, "Detective Simon was yelling in my face and threatening to violate my probation or include me in the shooting charges if I did not identify Deonte Howard as the shooter. I again told detective Simon that I did not know how the shooter was."
On two or three separate occasions, Bailey was taken to the Homicide Division for additional interviews "at the request of detective Simon," the affidavit states.
"While there, detective Simon would show me photographs of Deonte Howard and random black men," Bailey said. "Detective Simon would point to the photograph of Deonte Howard and scream, 'I know you know it's him. Tell me it's him.'"
Despite the threats, Bailey stuck to his version of the events and refused to implicate Howard.
At the time, Howard was 16 years old and just under five feet tall.
Another witness was fixing his mother's car when he saw the shooting. Steve Crane, a private investigator who helped gain the release of three innocent prisoners, is convinced that Howard is innocent and talked to the witness.
"I went and interviewed him and showed him a picture of Deonte," Crane tells Metro Times. "He said, 'No way. This guy was at least 5'11", 6 feet tall. I showed him a picture of Deonte, and he said, 'That's not the guy.'"
Earlier this month, Crane interviewed another convenience store worker who witnessed the shooting, and he said there was no way Howard was the shooter.
"He said he saw the shooting about two feet in front of him, and he said he was about 6 feet, 180 pounds. Back then, my client was under 5 feet tall," Crane says. "He said, 'There's no way that's him.' Why wouldn't you have the guy who was two feet away and witnessed it testify? You have to wonder how many cases like this are out there."
Howard is hoping that Bailey's affidavit and the additional witness, along with other information, will help him get a new trial.
During the initial investigation, Howard was not the original suspect. Witnesses described the shooter as nearly 6 feet tall, about a foot taller than Howard.
But police honed in on Howard because a phone belonging to a "Deonte" was found at the scene, he says. But it turns out the phone was owned by Deonte Miller, not Deonte Howard.
Police received a search warrant for Deonte Miller, who fit the description of the suspect and had a black Dodge Charger, which was spotted near the scene of the crime. The car was impounded, and a witness picked Miller out of a photo lineup, Howard says.
But for reasons that remain unclear, Miller was never charged.
During Howard's first trial, some of the witnesses didn't identify him as the shooter, and it ended in a hung jury.
Before the second trial, Howard says, Simon talked to the witnesses again, and this time they identified Howard as the shooter.
"I was 16 years old at the time. I didn't understand what was going on," he said.
He's 30 years old now and has lived his entire adult life in prison.
"I've been in here this whole time, just trying to fight for my life," Howard says from prison. "I lost my mom. She went to the grave trying to help me. I came from low income, so we didn't have money to make people hear what was going on."
He insists he's innocent.
"I ain't do nothing," he says. "I've been pleading innocence since. It's been falling on deaf ears, even after I showed the evidence."
Freed by DNA
In March 2008, Michael Ray was found murdered in his home.
Police believed Damon Nathaniel, who used to live at the home, may have been involved. Simon discovered that Nathaniel had an outstanding warrant for a traffic offense, so police arrested him on the warrant about two weeks after the murder and brought him to Simon for questioning.
Nathaniel was left at the precinct for eight hours and eventually was interviewed by Simon, who admitted she cursed at him, hollered, and repeatedly called him a liar.
Police claimed Nathaniel had a homosexual relationship with Ray, and Simon said he would have to confess to the murder if he wanted to bond out if he ever wanted to see his family, according to court records. Police falsely claimed they had DNA evidence connecting him to the murder.
When Nathaniel tried to leave the precinct, police beat him and locked him in jail overnight, according to a lawsuit he filed a year later. Nathaniel alleged he wasn't allowed to call his family to hire an attorney and was held in jail overnight. The next day, the interrogations continued.
Although the Detroit Police Department agreed to video record all interrogations due to a U.S. Justice Department consent decree, there was no camera or recording device.
Eventually, Nathaniel signed a confession he says he didn't write and was charged with murder. But a Wayne County judge threw out the confession because he was unlawfully detained and not given a chance to post bond on the traffic offense warrant.
Before the trial, DNA evidence excluded Nathaniel as a suspect, and the prosecutor moved to dismiss the case.
He spent eight months in prison before his release.
Nathaniel filed a lawsuit against Simon in 2011, alleging he was falsely imprisoned.
A judge awarded Nathaniel just $20,000.
‘Treated us like scum’
Terrill Johnson was 17 years old when police accused him of shooting at a car on the city's west side and killing a teenage occupant in April 2002.
Police apprehended him, his 19-year-old sister, and his mother for interrogations at the department's headquarters downtown. They separated the family members in different rooms and held them without an attorney or arrest warrant for eight to 10 hours, the son and mother say.
Even though Terrill Johnson wasn't yet an adult, police wouldn't let his mother see him.
"They treated us like scum," his mother Clara Johnson says. "It took the breath out of me. They had both of my children, and I couldn't speak to them. I wanted to be in the same room as him, and when I asked for an attorney, they said, 'No.' It felt like I was being railroaded and there was nothing I could do about it. They were going to do what they wanted to."
At one point, the mother says, Simon threatened to charge her with murder if she didn't cooperate and say her son fired the gun.
"She said I would get life in prison," she recalls.
Terrill Johnson says Simon moved him to a "little metal box-type room" and "locked me in there for like four hours."
Simon later confined him in another interrogation room for about a half hour before demanding that he confess. By then, he was tired and frustrated and willing to do almost anything to go home. He tried to explain his side of the story — that he had nothing to do with the murder.
"Every time I told her something she didn't like, she'd cut me off and say, 'It's bullshit,'" Johnson says from Muskegon Correctional Facility. "It was very coercive. At that point, I'm scared and ready to go. I'm willing to do whatever she wants me to do so she leaves me alone. I even asked for an attorney and they denied me an attorney."
Johnson says Simon made him believe he'd be OK if he just agreed with her version of events.
"It was mentally abusive," Johnson says. "She made me feel like, if I said what she wanted me to say, everything would be great. I would have said anything to make sure I was alright."
Johnson emphasizes that he was still a child and wasn't thinking of the ramifications of giving a false confession. He trusted that police authorities would not send an innocent teenager to prison.
"I have never been through nothing like that," he says. "At that point, I'm thinking these are people that are in power and they would never do nothing to harm me."
So, he says, he went along with what Simon wanted. Simon narrated a confession, and he signed it, he says.
"She led me to say what she wanted me to say," Johnson says. "That statement was basically her words. She wouldn't allow me to speak my truth. Every time I spoke my truth, she said it was bullshit."
At what is known as a "Walker hearing," a safeguard procedure where a judge determines the admissibility of a defendant's confession before the trial, Johnson's attorney tried to get the confession thrown out, arguing his client was given false promises and was coerced into signing a statement that wasn't his own. The judge denied the request and sided with Simon.
"They argued she was a detective for many years and would never do that stuff," he says of Simon coercing him into signing a false confession. "They were painting a picture of a standup, righteous detective."
After hearing about others who have been exonerated because of Simon's tactics, including Mark Craighead, who was exonerated in 2022, Johnson is hoping for a new trial.
"If this information about Simon was out back then, then that statement would have been thrown out, and I would have had a fair trial," he said. "The jury didn't get to hear what they did with Craighead and the others. I feel like a jury should have a chance to hear that."
Now that attorneys have demonstrated how Simon repeatedly elicited false confessions and illegally detained suspects and witnesses, Johnson believes judges and prosecutors should review cases like his.
"It seems like the courts and [Wayne County Prosecutor] Kym Worthy don't care," he says. "Once the detective was deemed to have done this to others, they should have systematically brought back the other cases." But they haven't, and Johnson fears he won't see freedom any time soon.
‘Loud and aggressive’
In 1999, at the height of the misconduct scandal in the Detroit Homicide Division, Damon Smith found himself in front of Simon for an interrogation. Smith, who was 24 years old and had no criminal record at the time, was accused of being involved in the fatal shooting of a teenager on Detroit's east side.
Police alleged that he, his brother, and two friends were looking for revenge and confronted the victim with a gun and baseball bat.
At the onset, he says, Simon was belligerent and threatening.
"Simon got loud and aggressive," Smith says from the Chippewa Correctional Facility. "She told me that if I didn't tell her who did the shooting, she was gonna make me the shooter."
He denied involvement, he says, and as a result was accused of pulling the trigger.
During a short jury trial, Smith was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Smith says his lawyer — a public defender — misrepresented him and failed to show he had an alibi.
"Barbara Simon knew the allegations that she narrated and wrote were a lie," Smith says. "I was given a fabricated role to play in someone else's crime."
After the trial, Smith's brother, Patrick Roberts, who was a prosecution witness, later recanted in a letter, saying Smith was not involved in the shooting. The actual culprits were two friends of one of the other prosecution witnesses, Roberts said. Roberts claimed that he originally incriminated his brother because his family had been threatened.
Despite the new information, courts have denied Smith's appeals.
He has been in prison for 25 years.
"My voice has been silenced for 25 years, along with the truth," Smith says.
"I never committed a crime in my life," Smith adds. "I don't have a criminal history. I was going to school to get a license to cut hair. I was working at a barber shop. I have two twin sons that I'm responsible for. I attended church every Sunday, and I played the drums in church. My life was good and promising until Barbara Simon falsely implicated me as the shooter. ... The justice system is the only criminal in my case."
He asks, "How much suffering must I endure before I get justice?"
His niece, Ochga Smith, is convinced her uncle is innocent and has sunk a lot of money trying to get him free. But the appeals have gone nowhere.
"For the last 10 years, his legal bills have fallen on me," she says. "Having to shell out thousands of dollars without seeing anything come to fruition is hard. It has been difficult to get attorneys to pay attention to the case."
She says the case has highlighted the problems with the justice system.
"Since I got involved in my uncle's case, the more I learn about the justice system, the more appalling it is to me," she says. "It doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. Police are not doing their job the correct way. It's like they are looking for the easiest way out, and courts aren't doing the due process. It's unfortunate not just for the people who are incarcerated, but also for the families.”
Fighting for freedom
Defendants who are wrongfully imprisoned often find themselves trapped in a cycle of legal battles for years. Courts are reluctant to intervene, even when evidence of police misconduct is strong. And prosecutors routinely resist efforts to secure retrials or hearings on new evidence.
On top of that, the legal standards for overturning convictions based on false confessions are high.
Without tens of thousands of dollars to hire an attorney, innocent people and their families are left with very little recourse.
While Craighead was in prison, his father drained the family's bank account to pay for legal help. When he ran out of money, he took out a reverse mortgage on his home. But as dementia began to erode his memory, he forgot to make a mortgage payment and lost the home in which he raised his son.
"He was tireless," Craighead said of his father, who is now 91 years old and lives in an assisted living home. "I was very blessed to have my dad."
Despite the money spent on attorneys, Craighead was no closer to getting out of prison. Then in 2009, after spending seven years behind bars, the Michigan Innocence Clinic was founded at the University of Michigan. It was the first innocence clinic in the country to focus exclusively on non-DNA cases, and Craighead became one of its first clients.
Lawyers for the clinic tracked down phone records at Sam's Clubs, which showed he was working an overnight shift at the big-box store and made several calls at the time of the murder. To prevent theft, the store locks in employees. So it would have been impossible for Craighead to leave without triggering an alarm at the store.
Craighead was paroled in 2009.
With the help of the Michigan Innocence Project, Craighead sought a new trial to clear his name. His attorneys focused on Simon's history of misconduct.
"Simon repeatedly committed egregious misconduct against innocent men in order to gain confessions and convictions," the Michigan Innocence Clinic wrote in a court filing.
In February 2021, Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Shannon Walker agreed and granted Craighead a new trial, saying Simon "has a history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath" and that the new evidence "establishes a common scheme of misconduct."
"Not only has this Court already found statements obtained by Simon not to be credible, but so too has the Michigan Supreme Court," Walker said.
"This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character of truthfulness," Walker added.
"The new evidence [from the phone records] establishes a common scheme of misconduct."
David A. Moran, co-founder of the Michigan Innocence Clinic and lead counsel on the Craighead case, says Simon's pattern of malfeasance was instrumental in gaining the new trial. Moran was also lead counsel for the cases of other men who were exonerated, including Justly Johnson, Kendrik Scott, and Lamarr Monson.
"What finally won it for us was the fact that there were a bunch of other cases involving Barbara Simon," Moran tells Metro Times. "Her credibility would have been shot had the jury known about these other cases, such as Johnson and Scott, where she interrogated kids who were picked up on the street and got them to falsely implicate somebody."
Rather than risk an almost certain loss at trial, Wayne County prosecutors dropped the case but refused to concede Craighead was innocent.
"The homicide occurred 25 years ago and Mr. Craighead served his sentence in the case," Wayne County Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman Maria Miller tells Metro Times. "The decision not to re-try the case does not reflect the merits of the case. It is based upon the age of the case, and the ruling of the court that makes it impractical to re-try. As a result WCPO agreed to the dismissal which was granted by the court today."
What Worthy's office didn't mention was that Valerie Newman, a former defense attorney and current head of the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), which is tasked with freeing innocent people from prison, previously represented Craighead while he was in prison and claimed in motions that he was innocent.
Of the four cases connected to Simon that were handled by the Michigan Innocence Clinic, all four successfully led to exonerations. And in each of those cases, Wayne County prosecutors fought to keep the men in prison, only to later dismiss the cases because of serious concerns about evidence or Simon's misconduct.
Since the clinic was created, it has successfully won the release of 41 men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes.
Defense attorneys say projects such as the Michigan Innocence Clinic are a godsend for inmates who have been wrongfully convicted and can't afford an attorney.
"If it wasn't for the Innocence Project and the conviction integrity units, this system would be a mess," Wolfgang Mueller, an attorney who specializes in wrongful imprisonment cases, says. "If it wasn't for them, all these people would die in prison."
Reviewing all of Simon’s cases
Given Simon's proven pattern of misconduct, prosecutors have an ethical obligation to make a sweeping review of all her cases — especially those that relied on confessions or witness statements, even if there are hundreds — according to activists, experts, exonerees, and defense attorneys.
"It takes the prosecutor and/or the chief of police to say, 'We have an officer who was involved in a pattern of misconduct known to produce wrongful convictions, so we are going to look at all of them,'" Moran says. "Preferably you want to have an outside entity, like a prestigious law firm, to look at all these cases. The problem with doing it internally is there is pressure to preserve as many of these convictions as you can."
Part of the problem, activists and defense attorneys say, is that exonerations lead to pricey lawsuits, so cities and prosecutors are often hesitant or unwilling to take actions that will lead to convictions being overturned.
Similar reviews have taken place in other cities where police were accused of obtaining illegal confessions. In April 2002, a judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate decades-old allegations that disgraced Chicago Detective Jon Burge tortured suspects to obtain confessions. A total of 60 cases were reviewed, leading to multiple exonerations and pardons for death row inmates.
In 2010, Burge was convicted of two counts of obstruction and one count of perjury and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Five years later, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel established a $5.5 million fund for Burge's victims.
The case against Burge prompted state lawmakers to make sweeping reforms, including requiring police to videotape interrogations, giving defendants more access to evidence, and empowering the Illinois Supreme Court to more easily dismiss unjust verdicts.
In May 2013, the Brooklyn's district attorney office ordered a review of about 50 murder cases assigned to New York City Detective Louis Scarcella, who was accused of fabricating confessions and witness statements. Numerous exonerations followed, costing the city $110 million.
"We haven't had that kind of scrutiny applied to officers in Detroit," Moran says.
The Detroit Police Department declined to comment on Simon's cases or say whether it has examined any of her past cases to determine if more innocent people may be imprisoned, citing ongoing litigation.
Moran believes the misconduct goes far beyond Simon and has resulted in countless false confessions and coerced witness statements. He points to the Department of Justice investigation that found police routinely and illegally rounded up and arrested witnesses and suspects without probable cause or warrants in the 1990s.
"They arrested witnesses, which is flagrantly unconstitutional and held them and threatened them until they implicated somebody," Moran says. "They held suspects without probable cause in rat-infested and cockroach-infested cells until they signed something. This was a widespread problem involving a number of detectives."
Prosecutors fail the innocent
No one has more authority to free an innocent person from prison than a prosecutor. In 2018, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy launched the CIU to review old cases to determine if people were wrongfully convicted. Since then, 38 inmates were either exonerated or their cases were dismissed as a result of the CIU. A disproportionate number of those cases — 13 — occurred in 2020, the year Worthy was running for reelection.
By contrast, only three cases were dismissed since January 2023, and no one was exonerated during that period.
None of the CIU's cases involved defendants who accused Simon of misconduct, leaving potentially innocent people with very little recourse.
Newman, head of the CIU, defended her unit, saying it is understaffed and overwhelmed with cases. Since the CIU was created, she says, prosecutors have received 2,311 requests to review cases. Of those cases, the CIU reviewed 1,177.
"Currently, there is a backlog of requests for conviction review that the CIU is working through," Newman tells Metro Times. "The CIU strives to handle all claims with care and attention as it works through its backlog."
Newman says she expects the unit to pick up the pace on reviewing cases. The CIU plans to soon hire new attorneys and a detective, she says, and the unit "is in the last stages of obtaining a fully functional database" that is intended to "expedite the navigating of documents to identify officers or individuals known to have had cases with wrongful convictions in the past."
Newman points out that there was "no opportunity" to get involved in the cases in which prisoners interrogated by Simon have already been exonerated because their cases preceded the creation of the CIU.
Newman also downplayed the potential scope of Simon's transgressions.
"The CIU is aware of the cases where judges have found Barbara Simons engaged in misconduct," Newman tells Metro Times. "Simon has likely worked on hundreds of cases throughout her career, and although the courts have found misconduct in some cases, we cannot assume this is the case in all of her cases."
Killers still on the loose
Wrongful convictions don't just send innocent people to prison; they also prevent police from capturing the real perpetrators. If they aren't pursued by law enforcement, they can go on to commit further crimes.
It also means victims and their families are deprived of justice.
In each of the cases involving the four exonerees in this investigative series, the real killers were never found.
The Innocence Project, another group that works to free wrongfully convicted people, helped overturn 102 false confessions cases through DNA evidence. That evidence led to the true perpetrator being convicted in 75% of the cases. What's more troubling is that the real perpetrators went on to commit 25 murders, 14 rapes, and nine other violent crimes, all of which could have been prevented if the wrong suspect wasn't convicted, according to the Innocence Project.
Craighead still wonders who killed his good friend and questions why police haven't pursued the real murderer.
"Why wouldn't you want the real murderer in jail?" he says. "That part kills me."
In an affidavit, Johnson claimed Simon refused to investigate his alibis and told him she didn't care if he was innocent. Simon said "it didn't matter because the mayor was her boss and her boss was on them and they were going to charge me with the murder whether I was innocent or not," according to Johnson.
Mueller, who represented Johnson and other wrongfully imprisoned men, said detectives were under substantial pressure to close cases because too many murders were going unsolved.
"Their closure rate was so low. You have pressure to close cases," Mueller says. "If there is collateral damage, I think they figured their batting average was high enough. The public was getting on the mayor, the mayor was getting on the chief, and basically the shit rolls down hill. The end justifies the means. I believe that was their mantra back in the 1990s. 'We ought to solve crime, and it doesn't matter how we get there.'"
Growing up in Detroit, Craighead was a happy, eager child who was quick to smile or crack a joke. His family adored him, and he learned to trust authorities. He played little league football in the Police Athletic League, and most of his coaches were cops.
"I learned to trust them," Craighead recalls. "I never had issues with trust. Now I can't trust nobody."
Unlike the other exonerees, Craighead carried a homicide on his record for 12 years after he was paroled in 2009, making it exceptionally difficult to land a job. Adjusting to life outside of institutionalization wasn't easy. Craighead, who regularly sees a therapist, says he still has nightmares about prison and can easily become anxious. He's far more guarded and cautious than he was before prison.
"A lot of the stuff you see on TV, it happens in prison," he says, referring to the fights, chaos, and abuse he's witnessed.
Craighead is also distressed that he couldn't support his dad when his memory began to fade with dementia.
But he also feels blessed that he's free and spends a lot of his time supporting people who say they've been wrongfully imprisoned.
"When I got out, I made a promise to God that I would bring more innocent people out of prison," Craighead says. "If I can get one person out a year, I'll be happy."
He adds, "It's very hard to be in prison when you're innocent. No one believes you."
When word spread about Craighead's experience with Simon, he said he heard from more than a dozen current inmates who insist the detective falsely accused them of murder.
"She did a lot of people the same way as me," Craighead says. "There are guys rotting in prison who have done absolutely nothing. They ain't got no other avenue out."
In 2013, Craighead created a nonprofit, Safe Place Transition Center, that helps veterans, lower-income families, and others. He provides housing, and every two weeks, he and his volunteers pass out groceries to more than 200 people in Mount Clemens.
On a recent Saturday morning, a line of cars waiting for food spanned more than two blocks long. Craighead loaded cardboard boxes with fresh produce, canned food, rice, beans, and applesauce and helped hand them out.
"It feels good to help people," Craighead says. "There's a lot of people in need."
Mueller says he's witnessed how prison changes even the most resilient people.
"It affects every bit of their psyche," he says. "I've had some real strong, tough individuals say it's the most dysfunctional place on Earth. All their young adult years are gone."
Monson, who spent 20 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, says he prepared for the day he'd be set free. He taught himself about running a business and worked as a clerk for the chaplain.
"I made up my mind when I was there and fighting to get out I needed to prepare myself," he says. "I looked to improve myself physically, mentally, and spiritually. I knew if I focused on those three things I'd be alright."
Unlike Craighead, Monson's record was wiped clean with his exoneration, so finding a job was much easier. Monson worked for a real estate business in Allen Park for two years and then started his own business, Royal Reign Enterprises, a residential renovations company. Not long after, he launched a second business, Royal Universal Care, an adult daycare.
Monson also created a community organization, Moving Detroit Forward, a group focused on establishing economic infrastructure in neglected areas of Detroit.
Most importantly, Monson says, he reunited with his daughter, who was only 6 years old when he went to prison. She was 27 when he got out.
"I'm really family-oriented," he says. "That's the most important thing to me. I'm trying to help make some changes out here."
Crane, the private investigator who works on getting innocent people exonerated, says the feeling of winning freedom for innocent prisoners is indescribable.
"Once you walk an innocent guy out of prison, it's like nothing you can ever imagine," Crane says. "It's like Christmas times 100.""
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