How many wrongful executions have there been

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Wrongful Execution. Wrongful Conviction. His court-appointed lawyer failed to call two witnesses who said they had seen the killer that night, and it was not Graham. There was also no physical evidence linking Graham to the murder, and the gun he had in his possession was not the murder weapon. However, he unwaveringly maintained his innocence of the murder. He was executed in Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in for murdering his three young daughters by setting his house on fire.

The three children died from smoke inhalation. The small town, which was about 55 miles north of Waco, collected money to help the Willinghams pay for the funerals. Douglas Fogg, the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, and Manuel Vasquez, a deputy fire marshall, investigated the fire.

A lab found mineral spirits, a substance often used in lighter fluid, in one of the samples of burned materials from the house. Just like that, the tragic fire became a triple homicide. Willingham was convicted of murdering his three girls and sentenced to death. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, to review the initial investigation. He had little doubt that it was an accidental fire that was likely caused by a space heater.

Vasquez recalled finding the space heater off, but Stacey was sure it was on. She remembered turning it down before she left because Amber was always putting things too close to it. Hurst told the Board of Pardons and Parole that there was no evidence of arson and that Willingham was about to be executed based on junk science. Despite receiving this report, the board unanimously voted to move forward with the execution.

Willingham died by lethal injection in He requested that his parents not be present. Shortly after, the Innocence Project hired four top fire investigators to do the same thing. They concluded that every indicator of arson that Fogg and Vasquez relied on had been proven scientifically invalid. In , Texas established a commission to investigate allegations of error in forensic science.

Kuykendall was essentially the only surviving member of the family. I miss them so much. On August 19, , Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark MacPhail intervened in an altercation between two men at a park and was shot twice and killed. A man named Sylvester Coles was present at the shooting and implicated Troy Davis. Nine other people who were at the park joined Cole in pointing the finger at Davis. Davis admitted to being at the park. He said that he saw Coles attacking a man but that he left before the shooting took place.

No physical evidence connected Davis to the crime, but a jury convicted him and recommended the death penalty based on the nine eyewitness accounts in August In September , the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper published a series of stories in which seven of the nine eyewitnesses recant their testimonies.

Many of them told the newspaper that police pressured them to implicate Davis and that it was actually Coles who shot MacPhail. On July 16, , the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Davis a day stay of execution just one day before he was scheduled to be executed.

The short answer is no. A small number of exonerees have been compensated for millions of dollars depending on the laws of the state that convicted them, but many receive little or nothing.

Few death-row exonerees more closely follow the issue of compensation than Ron Keine, who lives in southeastern Michigan. Growing up in Detroit, Keine ran with a rough crowd. At age 21, he and his closest friend, who both belonged to a notorious motorcycle club, decided to drive a van across the U. The extended open-road party was going as planned until he and four others were arrested in in Oklahoma and extradited to New Mexico, where they were charged with the murder and mutilation of a year-old college student in Albuquerque.

A motel housekeeper reported that the group raped her and that she then saw the group kill the student at the same motel. The problem with the story should have been readily apparent. They were partying in Los Angeles and had a dated traffic citation to prove it. The housekeeper later recanted her story.

In September a drifter, Kerry Rodney Lee, confessed to killing Velten, possibly because he felt guilty knowing that four men were on death row for his crime. Based on this evidence, Keine and his biker friends were granted new trials and the prosecutor decided not to indict them.

Lee was convicted in May of murdering Velten. Keine, who founded several successful small businesses after his exoneration, has testified before state legislators seeking to overturn capital punishment laws.

We try to build them up. We try and help them find the resources they need to survive. All rights reserved. Sentenced to death, but innocent: These are stories of justice gone wrong. Phillip Morris wrote the story on rethinking monuments in our February issue. Martin Schoeller specializes in portraiture and is currently focusing on death-row exonerees and Holocaust survivors.

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