In the last week or so, we all had our opinions about the Not Guilty verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse and the Guilty verdicts for the three guys responsible for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Whatever you think about those verdicts, it might be interesting to consider them in light of some other recent verdicts…
- Kevin Strickland always maintained his innocence. He'll walk free Tuesday for the first time since 1979, after a judge ruled he was wrongly convicted.
- On Nov. 23, just two days ahead of the holiday, [Pervis] Payne was formally removed from death row, where he has been wrongly imprisoned for a crime he's always said he didn't commit.
- Two of three men convicted in the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X have been exonerated after a New York judge dismissed their convictions Thursday. The Manhattan district attorney and lawyers for the two men moved to vacate the convictions of Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam in the 1965 killing, and Manhattan judge Ellen Biben tossed out the verdicts.
- Alice Sebold has remained silent after the man convicted of raping her was exonerated. The award-winning author is at the center of a heartbreaking saga surrounding a wrongful conviction that resulted in an innocent man spending 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Anthony Broadwater broke down in court this week when the rape conviction at the center of Sebold's memoir Lucky was overturned.
- Dontae Sharpe, a Charlotte, North Carolina, resident, breathed a heavy sigh of relief Friday upon receiving a pardon for a murder he didn't commit — after spending 24 years in prison.
- It has been 72 years since three black men and one teenager in Groveland, Florida were accused of kidnapping and raping a 17-year-old white teenage girl at gunpoint. Now, seven decades later, the four men have been exonerated by a Lake County Judge.
These are all in the last week-to-10-days and were easily found by Googling "wrongly convicted." Betcha there were others.
I've been paying attention to cases like these — and there are a lot of them — since many years ago when I heard someone say on a news program about one then-recent exoneration, "It's not amazing that someone could be wrongly convicted. It's amazing that they get exonerated. Once the government has convicted someone of a crime and sent them to prison — especially if they've been executed — the state has a compelling interest to not reopen the case and to not prove the system got it wrong."
I'm not drawing any conclusion here. I'm not sure what conclusion I would draw other than that it sure happens a lot. But I'm sure there's some conclusion in there.