Did Police Force False Confession from 12 Year Old for Murder?

January 15, 2012
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File this under completely F’d up!!!! Excuse my french, my friends know I only use it when I am truly passionate about something – hope I don’t let it slip in court one day.  So I have to admit I read the dailymail as my gossip, shut my brain off, candy but the article I found on it tonight was anything but light and airy. Another huge issue in wrongful convictions is false confessions dragged out by cops who should be fired and then in my humble opinion prosecuted. The case of Thomas Cogdell as reported by the dailymail would seem too fantastical to be true if I didn’t already know a few things about wrongful conviction and false confessions. Basically this 12 year boy has spent the last two years in prison for the murder of his sister who was suffocated. Police interrogated him ,likely alone, for many...

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Death Row Inmate Likely To Be Freed After 20 Years

January 15, 2012
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Jermaine Wright served 20 years on Delaware's death row and will likely be set free shortly.

Reading this article about Delaware death row inmate Jermaine Wright frustrates me. There are so many things wrong with his case and some of them echo Ben Spencer’s Texas case although there are many points of distinction as well. There is a jailhouse snitch who has since recanted his testimony that Wright allegedly confessed to him- Spencer has one of those in his case. There is no physical evidence in the case – much...

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Prosecutorial Misconduct Inquiry Requested by Exoneree Michael Morton

December 21, 2011
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On November 18th we posted a story about the wrongfully convicted Michael Morton receiving an apology from the prosecutor who convinced a jury to sentence him to prison for life.  Morton languished in jail for 25 years for the 1986 fatal beating of his wife before he was finally freed after DNA testing cleared him completely.  Now lawyers for the former Austin grocery store manager who had no prior criminal record before his arrest will request that prosecutor...

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A Travesty of Justice Squared

December 20, 2011
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A Travesty of Justice Squared

We shouldn’t be surprised if Steven Phillips is ready to just throw in the towel. It’s awful enough that the man was registered as a sex offender and spent 25 years of a life sentence in a Texas prison for a crime that DNA proved with certainty he didn’t commit. ...

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Jim Crow, Jr. — Like Father, Like Son

December 19, 2011
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 We buried Jim Crow several years ago after gradually beating him into submission over half a century, but he apparently had a son we didn’t know about. Lyndon Johnson did a hell of a lot of arm-twisting in his signature style to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed despite the...

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Recent Social Justice Posts from the ACLU’s Blog of Rights

December 12, 2011
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This morning I found three excellent ACLU posts that might be of interest to Canadoons: The Truth About the Racial Justice Act; Help Us Stop Congress From Passing Indefinite Detention Bill!; The Proof is in the Practice: FBI Documents Show Misuse of Community Outreach for Intelligence Gathering and Privacy Act Violations....

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SCOTUS to Review Nation’s Immigration Laws

December 12, 2011
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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed this morning to review Arizona’s law targeting illegal immigrants. The Obama administration has been fighting the actions of several states that have passed, or are considering passing, their own get-tough immigration laws, arguing that immigration is solely in the federal government’s domain.  The administration is trying to...

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Washington Post Editorial: “Righting a Wrongful Conviction in Virginia”

December 9, 2011
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Occasionally we come across an editorial or op-ed piece in one of the national media that we think will be of interest to our readers, and since it is entirely an expression of opinion we prefer to print it in full rather than paraphrase it and perhaps lose context....

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CNN Interviews the Documentary Filmmakers of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”

December 9, 2011
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CNN Interviews the Documentary Filmmakers of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”

In perhaps the most notorious of the many executions of Rick Perry’s gubernatorial term, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 for the murder of his three children in a house fire.  As Joe Bailey, Jr., and Steve Mims, the directors of the documentary “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” told CNN in...

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Some People Get It, Some People Don’t

December 6, 2011
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Here’s more empirical support for the Occupy movement: the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in a report released yesterday that the gap between rich and poor is widening on a global scale, not just here in our country.  A Bloomberg news story that reported the OECD information added that the...

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FYI from the TCADP

December 5, 2011
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FYI from the TCADP

The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) will release its annual report, Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2011, on December 15.  The report presents information on new death sentences, executions, stays, legislative developments, and other issues affecting the criminal justice system in Texas. Updated maps depicting death sentences...

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Feds to Probe Pennsylvania Prisoner Abuse

December 5, 2011
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If you’ve seen Robert Redford’s 1980 film “Brubaker”, which was based on the real life story of Arkansas prison superintendent Tom Murton, then this will sound familiar.  The Huffington Post reported late last week that the Justice Department will conduct a federal civil investigation into “alleged systematic civil rights abuses”...

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