Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 11, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. February 19, AM. News In a study released today, the National Academy of Sciences reports that at least 4.
The groundbreaking research reported that although death row inmates have been exonerated and released after proving innocence, many other innocent capital defendants are missed if they are removed from death row or have their sentences reduced to life in prison after appeals. Once the threat of wrongful execution is removed, less time and resources are devoted to seeking out cases of possible innocence.
Since some of the prisoners with reduced sentences could have died behind bars while serving a life sentence, the researchers used a statistical technique called survival analysis to yield an estimate of the percentage of death row defendants who would be exonerated if they had all remained indefinitely on death row and therefore subject to the exacting process for identifying innocent defendants that is applied to those who remain under threat of execution.
The researchers concluded that their 4. Read the full article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Help us advocate for the innocent by sharing the latest news from the Innocence Project. DPIC has led the way in highlighting the issue of innocence. Its list of exonerated individuals is presented in a searchable database , with links to more complete descriptions of each case. DPIC has issued a series of reports on this issue, collecting the latest information on why so many mistakes occur.
It also follows the related questions of whether innocent individuals have already been executed and whether some defendants are in fact innocent, despite not being completely exonerated in the eyes of the law. The data now show that f…. The U. For the Media. As the appointment got closer, the more nervous I became. The guards were dragging them from their cells.
They cry for help and struggle. Then they wake up and realize that they are still in their cells. Of the places where Amnesty International has recorded recent executions, the U. By , support had fallen to 54 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. From tiny Dover, Pennsylvania, Krone was the eldest of three children and a typical small-town American boy.
Raised a Lutheran, he sang in a church choir, joined the Boy Scouts, and as a teenager was known as a fairly smart kid, a bit of a prankster. He pre-enlisted in the Air Force during high school; after graduating, he served for six years. Having received an honorable discharge, he stayed in Arizona and went to work for the U. Postal Service, a job he planned to keep until retirement. The day after her body was discovered, Krone was ordered to provide blood, saliva, and hair samples.
A dental cast of his teeth also was created. The next day he was arrested and charged with aggravated murder. As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime. DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. He was sentenced to death.
I had served my country in uniform. I worked for the post office. This discrepancy in resources available to prosecutors and defendants in capital cases has long been replicated across the nation, leading to predictable outcomes for defendants staked to under-resourced and often ineffective legal counsel. Krone got a new trial in , when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld a videotape of the bite evidence until the day before the trial.
Again, he was found guilty. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death. They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation. A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing.
Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl. Gary Drinkard was no choirboy. When I spoke with Drinkard, he reminded me of a weather-beaten man straight out of a Merle Haggard song. He wore coveralls and chain-smoked Newports. He spoke slowly and guardedly in a deep southern drawl. He grew exasperated only when I asked him to describe his time on death row. That certainly seemed to be the plan.
Drinkard was found guilty in and sentenced to death. He would spend close to six years on death row. It provided him with legal counsel. A county jury found Drinkard not guilty within one hour, and he was released. There have been more than 2, exonerations overall in the U. In Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the nation to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was arrested in and charged with raping and murdering Dawn Hamilton, a nine-year-old girl, near Baltimore, Maryland.
Police were alerted to Bloodsworth, who had just moved to the area, when an anonymous tipster reported him after seeing a televised police sketch of the suspect.
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