Innocent man freed after 17 years in a first-of-its-kind hearing

So after a number of DNA exonerations in recent years the state of North Carolina set up a special agency a few years ago to review claims of actual innocence. It was given the authority to exonerate prisoners. It's a unique system in American criminal justice and yesterday, for the first time, the Innocence Inquiry Commission set a man free after deciding that there is clear and convincing evidence that he is innocent of the murder of which he was convicted. It's a pretty amazing story because this guy had long ago run out of options for appealing it within the existing system and had this commission never been set up, he would have spent the rest of his life in jail.

http://www.newsobserver.com/home/story/344803.html

 

Hope he's planning a nice costly lawsuit.

 

I'm eagerly awaiting the O_T brigade to show up to this thread and tell us that he was surely "guilty of something," much like the Cameron Todd Willingham case.

 

Only if he doesn't use the same lawyer who defended him.

 

Unfortunately he was. He was a drug addict, and seems to make no bones about that. Still, that's no excuse for being wrongly convicted of murder.

Gotta love the appeals system: Even if new information comes to light, you can't introduce it.

 

Drug addiction is not a crime.

 

This is awesome, I hope other states follow suit.

 

Fewer problems would occur if posters stopped posting about how they anticipate problems while singling out certain posters.

 

Drug possession is.

 

Isn't Wake County the county where the Duke lacrosse team players were prosecuted?

 

If I were him, now that I'm free, I'd lawyer up and sue the fuckers.

 

And for good reason. You are entitled to a jury of your peers. The jury at trial level gets to view the witnesses. They get to make first-hand observations about trustworthiness, etc., etc. They get to engage in the entire narrative of the trial presented by both sides, to make first-hand determinations about evidence. Appeals courts are designed to consider matters of law, not fact. You can't roll out the entire trial circus again at every level of the judicial system. They system is not designed for that. It is designed to make sure that the law was applied correctly.