How many innocent people executed in usa

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. For Educators. Fact Sheet. Policy Issues Innocence The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person. The wife of one of the other men corroborated her story. Just before a.

Georgia tried Terrell three times. The first trial ended in a mistrial when jurors could not agree on whether he was guilty. The second resulted in a conviction that was later overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court.

The third trial concluded with a conviction and death sentence. The key testimony against Terrell came from his cousin, Jermaine Johnson, a witness whom defense investigators say later admitted to having lied to save himself. Johnson spent a year in jail facing the threat of the death penalty before he made a deal with prosecutors to testify against Terrell in exchange for a five-year sentence. Johnson told defense investigators that police and prosecutors had pressured him into giving false testimony against his cousin.

Texas executed Richard Masterson on January 20, , amid questions as to whether any murder had occurred at all. Two pathologists who examined the Honeycutt autopsy data say that the Shrode was unqualified and incorrectly ruled the death a homicide, when it was most likely caused by a heart attack. Shrode was subsequently fired as chief medical examiner in El Paso County, Texas, after discrepancies were found in his resume and revelations were made about his unsupported testimony in the Ohio case.

In a separate filing, they challenged the fairness of his trial because the judge had failed to inform jurors that they could have convicted Masterson of a lesser offense, rather than capital murder. Pruett was sentenced to death in for the stabbing death of Officer Daniel Nagle, a state correctional officer who was at the center of a prison corruption investigation.

Pruett had long maintained that he had been framed for the murder. Earlier on the day of the murder, Officer Nagle had given Pruett a disciplinary write-up for eating a sandwich in an unauthorized area. Pruett had no history of prison violence. The same day Pruett was indicted, four correctional officers were indicted on federal bribery charges for participating in a drug smuggling ring.

Unreliable Witnesses? Was Daniel Nagle murdered by a man acting alone, or was it part of a larger conspiracy? Georgia executed Carlton Michael Gary on March 15, without any federal court review of substantial evidence suggesting that he did not commit the crimes for which he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Although Gary was charged with three rapes and murders, the prosecution presented evidence of other uncharged crimes under the theory that they had all been committed by the same person. The most damning of that evidence was the eyewitness testimony of a surviving victim who dramatically identified Gary as the person who had raped her and tied a stocking around her neck.

However, a police statement withheld from the defense indicated that the witness had initially told investigators that she had been asleep and her bedroom dark at the time of the assault and she could not describe, let alone identify, her attacker. Gary sought to test DNA evidence from other crime scenes that was in the possession of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but as a result of improper handling, the samples had been contaminated and were untestable.

During the post-conviction process, Gary learned that police had made a mold of a bite mark from one of the victims and had consulted with a leading forensic odontologist, but had never presented him as a witness. When that expert examined the mold, he concluded that the markings could not have been made by Gary. Finally, police claimed that Gary had confessed to participating in the crimes, but not to raping or murdering the victims.

Alabama executed Domineque Ray on February 7, However, Ray had also argued that he was innocent and that the evidence against him was false and unreliable. Ray was convicted in July of the alleged rape, robbery, and murder of year-old Tiffany Harville in Selma, Alabama. No physical evidence linked Ray to the murder, and the only evidence that Harville had been raped and robbed came from a severely mentally ill man, Marcus Owden, who confessed to the crime and avoided the death penalty by implicating Ray.

Owden was also the only person who placed Ray in Selma at the time of the murder. The records documented that Owden had been diagnosed with serious mental illness, psychosis, and schizophrenia; that he was suffering from hallucinations and delusions, and exhibited signs of bizarre speech and distortions of cognition; and that he had a propensity for lying. Ray was convicted and, after a one-day penalty phase, a non-unanimous sentencing jury recommended that he be sentenced to death. In September , the trial court imposed the death penalty.

Supreme Court declined to review the merits of his prosecutorial misconduct claim. Read the U. Supreme Court petition for writ of certiorari in Ray v. Texas executed Larry Swearingen on August 21, , despite significant flaws with virtually every piece of forensic evidence in his case and strong evidence that it was physically impossible for him to have committed the crime.

That included: false expert testimony linking Swearingen to the murder weapon, false testimony dismissing exculpatory blood evidence, false cell tower testimony, and false testimony concerning the time of death. The research team deployed statistical devices to put a figure on the proportion of cases of hidden innocence. The study, published in a prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not solve perhaps the greatest single riddle of the death penalty: how many innocent people have actually been put to death in modern times.

That remains a haunting unknown. The ballpark figure of at least 4. In fact, the claim is silly. 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.

At his second execution date , the Supreme Court of the United States delayed the execution just two hours before it was scheduled pending its decision to hear the case. They ultimately decided not to hear the case , and three days before his third execution date, the Georgia Court of Appeals stayed the execution to allow for a new petition. Several failed appeals later, they set a fourth execution date for September 21, Before his execution , he told his sister, Kimberly Davis, that he wanted her to continue fighting to clear his name and end the death penalty.

She has committed her life to campaigning around the country to end the death penalty in every state. Jimmy Dennis spent 25 years on death row for the murder of year-old Chedell Williams.