#exonerees

[gwydionmisha]

Exonerees struggle to rebuild their lives and gain lasting employment, even if elected to office

People who are wrongfully incarcerated then exonerated, sometimes after spending decades behind bars, face yet more challenges finding jobs

[ansy1984]

Exonerees struggle to rebuild their lives and gain lasting employment

HOUSTON — Richard Miles set out to find a job after his release from a Texas prison in 2009 with a collection of newspaper clippings about his wrongful murder conviction as his resume. No one would hire him, including warehouses and fast-food restaurants. It was a period of painful rejection that is familiar to exonerees. Some see their own struggles reflected in Calvin Duncan, who won elected…

Exonerees struggle to rebuild their lives and gain lasting employment

[sarahspy]

A lot of my story is just me sitting in a prison cell reading a book hoping that that stuff is going to get worked out. Or, you know, one of the stories that I would love to tell, because it’s an interesting one that a lot of the exonerated face is the 'Now what?' after you get out of prison after spending time in prison for something you didn’t do. How do you reintegrate into society again after you’re processing the sort of collapse not just in, you know, your own life, but also your faith in society, your faith that society has your back and that what you’re going to do is going to matter and that you can plant roots. How do you carry on to do even just, like, the really simple things of meeting people and going on a date and getting a job? These are all challenges that exonerees have a really interesting sort of surreal twist as they enter into the world. And that’s been a deep challenge for me of trying to reestablish my identity after it was stolen and after I couldn’t ever, ever get it back, because it’s not like I came back to a world where I got to be just Amanda Knox again.

Amanda Knox, Amanda Knox, in her own words

[xoner8ed]

@jeffbezos @amazon @amazon_helps I'm hopeful you c an help me, help anaout 150 innocent men & women that are exonerated each year & come home empty handed. An @amazon gift card or an #Amazon #WelcomeHome gift package would be huge. Please help me make this happen. #Exonerees need ur help. #makinganexoneree #freetheinnocent #exonereesrock #wrongfulconviction #freedom #xoner8ed #fightinjustice (at Apple Campus) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByP1cQyHHCE/?igshid=6thee5fiq2nl

[dustyrhodes30-blog]

#exonerees #wrongfullyconvicted #smallclubyoudontwanttojoin (at Crowne Plaza Springfield)

[texasobserver]

The Interview: Anthony Graves

Graves spent 18 years in prison, 12 on death row, before he was exonerated and released. In February, Charles Sebesta, the prosecutor in Graves’ case, lost his appeal to overturn his disbarment for withholding evidence and using false testimony to win a conviction against the former inmate.

Texas Observer: Does the disbarment of Charles Sebesta feel like justice to you?

Anthony Graves: Let’s just say that if he was a regular laborer on the street, he’d have been brought in for attempted murder. So how can it really feel like justice when there is one law for the laborers and there is one law for those we elect? He just got disbarred. But if it had been any man on the street that had attempted murder on a citizen’s life, he’d have to answer to that in our court system under charges of attempted murder. So is it justice? It’s the beginning, because now we know that [Sebesta] can no longer go after another innocent person and destroy their life and the lives of their family. But it’s just the beginning.

TO: Sebesta withheld exculpatory evidence and told the court that your alibi witness was a suspect. Why did he go to such lengths?

AG: Because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He had spent over 20 years in the DA’s office. He was running unopposed, so this was a man who had a lot of authority. … And you sprinkle that in with [the fact that] I did not look like him, I did not grow up around him. We’ve got a big problem with race in our current justice system.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW

[texasobserver]

Exoneree Christopher Scott visits with an inmate named Isaiah Hill in this interview from a documentary film called Freedom Fighters. Both the documentary and a new Observer story by Michael May tell the story of three exonerees who have formed their own detective agency dedicated to freeing the innocent from prison. 

[newsweekscience]

The Murders at the Lake

Every murder involves a vast web of people, from the witnesses and the detectives who first come to the scene, to the lawyers and the juries who examine the facts, to the families of the victims, who must make sense of the aftermath.

The more traumatic the killing, the more intricate the web. In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason, at a park by a lake on the edge of town.

Justice was eventually served when four men were found guilty of the crime, and two were sent to death row. In 1991, though, when one of the convicts got a new trial and was then found not guilty, some people wondered, Were these four actually the killers?

Several years after that, one of the men was put to death, and the stakes were raised: Had Texas executed an innocent man? This story examines the case through the viewpoint of five people: a patrol sergeant who investigated the crime; a police detective who became skeptical of the investigation; an appellate lawyer who tried to stop the execution; a journalist whose reporting has raised new doubts about the case; and a convict who pleaded guilty but now vehemently proclaims his innocence. A word about the reporting.

This article is the result of a full year of research—dozens of interviews were conducted with the principal and minor players, and thousands of pages of transcripts, depositions, and affidavits, from the case’s six capital murder trials and one aggravated sexual abuse trial, were carefully reviewed. Still, what follows is not a legal document; some of the people involved in the case are dead, others don’t remember much, and even others—including the patrol sergeant who investigated the case and the DA who prosecuted it—refused to be interviewed.

What follows is a story, built around the question that has haunted so many people for so many years: What really happened at the lake that night?