Cornelius Dupree Jr. celebrates his victory and freedom.

Rape, genuine rape, in which the right perpetrator has been charged, tried and convicted, belongs at the top of society’s most heinous crimes. It’s hardly an accident that judges and juries have a tendency to rush to judgment once they are convinced that the correct person is on trial.

The problems arise when the evidence is faulty, the investigation sloppy and the prosecution more concerned with victory than justice.

In recently published reports, from the Associated Press and other new outlets, the saga of Cornelius Dupree Jr., unfolded. He spent 30 years wrongfully imprisoned in connection with a rape and robbery case in Texas, where an amazing number of rape convictions have been overturned because of prosecutorial mistakes, mis-informed witnesses or newly acquired DNA evidence.

A week ago, Mr. Dupree told reporters that “it is a joy to be free again” after being officially exonerated in a Dallas courtroom.

Dallas County Courthouse

The focus for much of this delayed justice, finally realized has to again be on Barry Scheck and his staff at the Innocence Project, the organization behind many of these exonerations, including Dupree’s, according to the published sources.

As the AP accounts explained it, Scheck said that, “It’s a great tribute to Cornelius and his spirit that he was able to fight this long and this hard to win his freedom,” said Scheck, who sat next to Dupree in the car as they drove away.

Dallas has so many exonerations not because it was more egregiously unjust than other counties in Texas, but because unlike other jurisdictions, Dallas County kept the DNA evidence refrigerated and stored for decades. That’s what saved these men. What convicted them was erroneous eyewitness testimony.

Of the 21 men exonerated in Dallas, 20 were convicted on the strength of the victims’ identification. That, in turn, has pointed the finger at the police and prosecutors who are now themselves accused of pushing rape victims to make cases. Scheck says that’s what happened in Dupree’s case, too.

“The kinds of eyewitness procedures that were used in his case were ridiculous,” Scheck said. “And they are the reason that he was wrongfully convicted.”

Another one of the reasons these exonerations are happening in Dallas is because it elected Craig Watkins, Texas’ first black district attorney. Before becoming DA, Watkins was a defense attorney who says he saw firsthand how the county sometimes railroaded poor black men.

Watkins’ willingness to work with the Innocence Project has not made him popular with many of his colleagues and some lawmakers in Austin.

“It’s been proven that the system needs to be fixed, and we know actually where we can fix it,” Watkins said. “How about those people who are in positions of power and influence getting on board?”

Dupree wasn’t let out of prison because he was innocent; he was finally paroled in July after serving 30 years. He says he’s not angry, but does harbor some resentment.

“I do have some ill feelings, you know, in terms of how the system went. I had to take so long to finally bring this to light,” Dupree said. “It was so many losses; that’s what hurts me the most.”

Dupree says he just wants to live quietly now and try to enjoy his life.

For a similar local story, follow this link to philly.com to learn about Larry Peterson who was found innocent of rape in New Jersey.

From the New York Post:

The stories of false rape accusations are attracting readers and some very talented writers. The first book recommended here, Actual Innocence, is a journalistic and legal classic. It was one of the first, recent powerful indictments of the criminal justice system in the United States. It also helped start The Innocence Project, an important part of the national effort to make the justice system more just.

The second book, Picking Cotton, came out last year and it tells the riveting story of a woman who falsely accused her alleged attacker – through a mistake – and then took complete moral and legal responsibility for her unfortunate actions. This book is filled with authentic, reluctant heroes who saw a bad situation for what it was and who took it upon themselves to bring about change. The main villain is the real rapist who committed his crimes in the first place and who then allowed an innocent man to pay for them.

Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right (NAL Trade, 2003)

By Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer

(This review is courtesy of Amazon Books and the New York Times)

While you may find “Actual Innocence” in the “true crime” section of your bookstore, this is not your typical fare of a more or less well-written and soon-to-be-TV-movie account of a harrowing crime, or series of crimes.

And while the book undeniably shows the hands of two lawyers who know how to craft a closing argument, and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, this is at heart, as the authors point out – and disturbingly so – a “work of nonfiction.”

“Actual innocence” is an account of the work of Scheck’s and Neufeld’s “Innocence Project,” describing some of the Project’s most prominent and successful cases, and a scathing condemnation of the shortcomings of the American system of criminal justice – particularly, under the Supreme Court’s holding in Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390, 404 (1993) (Rehnquist, C.J.) that “a claim of `actual innocence’ is not itself a constitutional claim.”

Under Herrera and the cases following it, a federal court can reject a defendant’s petition for relief even if it is based on proof of innocence, even if that proof is, as in the cases represented by the Innocence Project, of a scientific nature (DNA evidence showing that the defendant cannot have committed the crime he has been convicted of), and even if the deadlines for submitting that proof are so short that it is virtually impossible for a defendant to present evidence obtained post-conviction in time for a consideration at least in the state court system, which review has to precede a review by the federal courts.

In Herrera, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas death sentence after the defendant had missed the state law’s 30-day deadline to get a new trial based on new evidence. And while that particular case involved questions of the reliability of circumstantial evidence, admissions of guilt and eyewitness identifications (briefly, at night and without live testimony by one of the witnesses), these exclusionary rules apply regardless of the type of evidence presented.

In the cases that Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer describe here, this sometimes meant that DNA evidence which, due to scientific advances, had only become available years after the conviction, was not admitted, even if it conclusively proved that the wrong person had been convicted.

The defendants were left to petition for executive clemency, which is discretionary and, more often than not, depends on the amount of political pressure exercised.
It is often argued, particularly by proponents of the death penalty, that the criminal justice system functions well, and that even in the best system, regrettable errors cannot be prevented. The authors of “Actual Innocence” make a compelling case for the contrary. Even if a lawyer’s shortcomings in the representation of his client may, in theory, lead to the reversal of a conviction, the bar here is almost as high as that for the presentation of proof of innocence.

In Texas, e.g., not even a lawyer sleeping during the trial or showing up drunk is considered ineffective and, like in other states, most mistakes made out of inexperience with the handling of murder/felony trials will not be enough to support a reversal, either.

Moreover, scientific evidence, such as a “DNA fingerprint,” is often not available to indigent defendants, who are most likely to be hurt by inefficient trial attorneys because they lack the means to hire counsel experienced and sophisticated enough to handle a trial of that nature.

These more often than not are the ingredients of a cocktail which, without timely and forceful intervention, can be as lethal as the death penalty itself; even if there is not, in addition, abuse on the prosecutorial side – failure to fully investigate and/or disclose the evidence available in the case (including exculpatory evidence), racial bias in the jury selection, misconduct by scientists acting as the government’s experts, etc.
It is often argued, particularly by proponents of the death penalty, that the criminal justice system functions well, and that even in the best system, regrettable errors cannot be prevented. The authors of “Actual Innocence” make a compelling case for the contrary.

Even if a lawyer’s shortcomings in the representation of his client may, in theory, lead to the reversal of a conviction, the bar here is almost as high as that for the presentation of proof of innocence.

In Texas, e.g., not even a lawyer sleeping during the trial or showing up drunk is considered ineffective and, like in other states, most mistakes made out of inexperience with the handling of murder/felony trials will not be enough to support a reversal, either.

Moreover, scientific evidence, such as a “DNA fingerprint,” is often not available to indigent defendants, who are most likely to be hurt by inefficient trial attorneys because they lack the means to hire counsel experienced and sophisticated enough to handle a trial of that nature.

These more often than not are the ingredients of a cocktail which, without timely and forceful intervention, can be as lethal as the death penalty itself; even if there is not, in addition, abuse on the prosecutorial side – failure to fully investigate and/or disclose the evidence available in the case (including exculpatory evidence), racial bias in the jury selection, misconduct by scientists acting as the government’s experts, etc.

I think we have all seen, repeatedly, TV reports on persons released from prison, sometimes only days before their execution, based on belated proof of their innocence. All of these cases expose, in differing ways, the inherent weaknesses of the criminal justice system.

While I have not been practicing in the U.S. long enough to echo the verdict handed down by the Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer, who declare this country’s criminal justice system “a shambles,” many facts recounted by them ring true to me even now. I also stop to consider if not only a Democratic president (Clinton) imposes a moratorium on the death penalty but a Republican governor, a declared proponent of capital punishment, takes the same action and orders an investigation because “since the reestablishment of the death penalty in Illinois in 1977, there have been persistent problems in the administration of the death penalty as illustrated by the thirteen individuals on death row who have had their death sentences and convictions vacated by the courts” and “the number of death sentences and criminal convictions being vacated or overturned has raised serious concerns with respect to the process by which the death penalty is imposed.”

(Illinois Governor H. Ryan, Executive Order Creating The Governor’s Commission On Capital Punishment, May 4, 2000).

Of course, not every claim of innocence is justified. But any criminal justice system should be able to allow for the presentation of conclusive proof of innocence, regardless how belatedly. And while the question of guilt or innocence may not dominate the discussion on the recent developments in the McVeigh case – to many people, even those otherwise opposed to the death penalty, the poster child for its application – I am not exactly comfortable with the assessment by President George W. Bush, who in 6 years as governor of Texas oversaw more than 150 executions, that McVeigh “is lucky to be an American.

This is a country that will bend over backwards to make sure that his constitutional rights are guaranteed, as opposed to rushing his fate.” (N.Y. Times, May 12, 2001.) http://www.innocenceproject.org

Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption (St. Martin’s Press, 2009)

(This review is from Kirkus Review and appear on the Picking Cotton website.)

A rape victim and the man she falsely accused—in good faith—collaborate to share an important, affecting story of fatally mistaken identity.

Thompson-Cannino was a college student at Elon College in1984, when a knife-wielding man broke into her Burlington, N.C., apartment and raped her.

She saw him clearly and escaped the apartment before he could harm her further. After working with a police sketch artist and examining mug shots gathered by police, she identified 22-year-old Cotton, who was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. He maintained his innocence from the time police approached him, but nobody except his family believed him.

Sophisticated DNA testing did not exist in the mid-’80s, and few people inside or outside the criminal-justice system understood the unreliability of eyewitness identification, especially across racial lines. (Thompson-Cannino is Caucasian, Cotton African-American.)

Convicted prisoners rarely receive attention when claiming innocence from their cells, and they usually lack the money, the legal assistance and the support network to make their assertions heard. Cotton didn’t have much money, but he drew strength from his family and found unusually receptive lawyers willing to represent him pro bono in time-consuming, seemingly hopeless post-conviction proceedings. Journalist Torneo alternates between the first-person narratives of Thompson-Cannino and Cotton.

When Cannino heard that a DNA test had set Cotton free after 11 years in prison, she was stunned and guilt-ridden.

After seeing a TV documentary about how eyewitnesses make mistakes, in which Cotton said he wondered why he’d never heard from the woman responsible for his wrongful incarceration, she arranged to meet him.

Despite the nervousness of her relatives and the anger of his wife, they built up mutual trust, became friends and eventually began traveling together to educate audiences about flaws in the criminal-justice system.

Injustice and redemption are overused words, but this heartfelt joint memoir justifies its subtitle.

http://www.pickingcottonbook.com

Here at FoundInnocent.org we’ve discovered an important new blog devoted to the plight of men and women falsely accused of rape – The False Rape Society.

The mission of the site is outlined in this quote from the noted defense lawyer and legal scholar, Prof. Alan Dershowitz:

Rape is such a serious crime that deliberately bringing a false accusation of rape should be an equally serious crime and women are not being punished for those crimes. I believe that being falsely accused of rape is as traumatic as being raped.

The False Rape Society poses several important questions:

• Why are feminists, authors and activists, alike, so slow to question the validity of these selfish, heartless false accusers?
• Why is the incidence of false rape accusations going up and up?
• Why are those accused of false rape accusations persistently referred to as “victims” by a mass media that is so easily duped?
• Why are prosecutors (and there are courageous exceptions to this) so reluctant to file charges against those who make false accusations in the first place?
• Why is the mass media so unwilling to follow-up on the stories of men and women who have been falsely accused and who have then gone on to struggle to regain their reputations, peace- of-mind and their careers?

The explanation of the rationale behind this site is one of the most eloquent explanations of the problem that FoundInnocent.org has ever encountered. It is well worth reprinting here for our readers and for all of those “real” victims falsely accused of rape:

This Web site was started by an attorney in the United States to help raise awareness about the serious and largely ignored problem of false rape claims. Every objective study ever conducted on this subject reveals that false rape claims are a significant problem. But despite the grievous harm often suffered by the falsely accused, their unique needs are rarely acknowledged, much less addressed.

As a society, we permit the reputations of persons falsely accused of sex crimes to be destroyed by even baseless accusations of a lone accuser; we permit the presumptively innocent, who too often turn out to be falsely accused, to be arrested and jailed on even far-fetched claims, with bail set sufficiently high to insure they won’t be released before trial; and we excuse false accusers with little or no punishment, inviting others to falsely accuse with impunity and without deterrent.

The unique needs of the falsely accused are ignored because the entire rape milieu has become unnecessarily gender-politicized, and the persons who dominate the public discourse about rape apparently believe that acknowledging the false rape problem would somehow hamper the war on rape.

By any measure, denigrating the experience of the wrongly accused by dismissing them as a myth or as unworthy of our discussion, and regarding the victimization of our daughters as somehow more worthy of our protection than the victimization of our sons, is not merely dishonest but morally grotesque.

Please, become a regular reader of and contributor to fearless, insightful blogs and websites like The False Rape Society: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com

This is not a perfect organization. Not too many are. But the enduring — founded in 1992 — strength of the Innocence Project is its absolute refusal to write off people or cases as lost causes.

And circumstantial evidence, malicious media reporting and horrendous police work, not to mention inadequate legal representation, can make some of these cases look pretty hopeless.

This approach takes what they once referred to as “true grit.”

Since it was begun by celebrity lawyer Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld and the good people at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York, the Innocence Project has gone international with sister organizations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, all dedicated to proving the innocence of wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA testing and the overall reform of criminal justice systems to prevent future injustice.

Today, Project Innocence is a recognized and admired non-profit leader.

As the organization explains, “In addition to working on behalf of those who may have been wrongfully convicted of crimes throughout the United States, The Innocence Project performs research and advocacy related to the causes of wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project is a member of the Innocence Network, which brings together a number of innocence organizations from across the United States.”

As of January 21, 2010, 249 defendants previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and approximately 25% involved murder.

Never let it be said that the Innocence Project only tackles the easy ones.

For more information, please visit the Innocent Project or the Innocence Network.

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program of the United States defines murder and non-negligent manslaughter as the willful non-negligent killing of one human being by another. The classification of this offense is based solely on police investigation as opposed to the determination of a court, medical examiner, coroner, jury, or other judicial body.

In other words, the police provide all of our statistical information on the prevalence of murder – based on who they initially charge with what, not on trials, convictions or justice. That’s a key point to remember because so many media reports and bad blog information is based on those initial arrest reports, which are so often later changed, lowered or dismissed. All that an arrest really means is that the cops stopped you and detained you. An arrest never explains what really happened. (By the way, all of the numbers that follow come courtesy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, by the U.S. Census department, the least-biased reference source that I’m aware of.)

In America, which is neither one of the safest nor most violent countries in the world, if you are murdered – and this happens to almost 15,000 persons a year, in a country of well over 200 million — it is most likely to happen during the course of a robbery, or during an argument over narcotics or money.

Most of the time, you will be murdered by a handgun. (Regardless of where you stand on gun control, cold, clear logic dictates that were law enforcement to dramatically reduce the availability of handguns, legal or illegal, the number of murder victims would be even more profoundly reduced, because less than 1000 people a year are ever murdered by rifles or shotguns. Just a thought.)

In a typical year only one person in the country is ever murdered through an explosion or sniper attack, (which, coincidently, knocks out the plot lines of every season of 24 ever broadcast); no more than 12 through drowning and about 10 through poisoning. Now we are moving in on CSI territory where people are continually being dispatched by weird poisonings. Sorry Horatio.

If you have not been murdered by a handgun, then the next most common weapon of choice is the knife. To be murdered over a gambling debt is extremely rare, involving only about 4 victims a year. There is a little more likelihood that you will be a murder victim during the commission of a sex crime, about 31 rape victims a year are also murdered; prostitutes and commercial sex workers actually fare much better, with no more than 11 such victims of that description – which isn’t enough to even flesh out one full season of Law & Order, Special Victims Unit, where the opening beat of many, many shows depicts a dead and ravaged hooker – which rarely happens in real life for the same reason that so few gamblers who owe money are ever killed: it is very, very bad for business. Where’s the profit in a corpse?

In practice that means that the police, not a judge or jury, label a person a “murderer”. This is the “charging” aspect of law enforcement. Frequently, these “charges” quickly change; other police, prosecutors or even witnesses can routinely force charges to be dropped, changed or, sometimes, increased in severity.

“Charging” is an inexact science. The police are prone to front-load on charges, sometimes making the alleged crime appear, by the charge, to be worse than it actually was. There is much political manipulation and chicanery with statistics involved in this “charging”. The classic example is the drunk who relieves himself against a wall. This act might amount to “disturbing the peace” or “public drunkenness”. It is, at worst, a “summary” offense, or an act for which a person is ticketed and expected to pay a fine, like driving above the speed limit.

However, if there happens to be a public outcry about cracking down on prostitution or something similar in a given jurisdiction, at that moment, then this summary offense can immediately be escalated to “lewdness”, “soliciting a prostitute” (even though there wasn’t another human being in the vicinity), something exotic like “stalking”, or even something as damning as the felony of “attempted rape.” All this because a given police department needs to pad its statistics, play to the media, and take it all out on some drunk who only needed to take a whizz. The drunk in question could even end up on a register of sex offenders. But, that’s the nature of the “charging” function.

What is truly alarming is that such situations can actually take on lives of their own and result in unfounded murder charges and even convictions.

The websites that we present here deal with these tragic miscarriages of justice. In the highlighted cases, some rough equivalent of “justice” finally prevailed and the accused were eventually exonerated. But these restorations of the equilibrium came only after untold years of human suffering, mental, physical and emotional agony and even wrongful executions.

We salute the dedicated experts who have contributed so much to the efforts to free the unjustly charged, convicted and imprisoned.



However, when the woman later admits to making up the story,  you begin to wonder why she would go to such lengths to mask her true nature. It turns out she was attempting to hide an extra-marital affair.

The above mentioned woman is Marissa Ann Lovingood, a resident of Cherokee County, NC.

Ms. Lovingood decided to fabricate a story involving two masked carjackers and her fragile person. As the story (she originally told authorities) goes: she was at a stop sign at 3:30AM on February 7 when the two alleged perpetrators broke into her car, put a gun to her head and told her not to scream. She was then driven to a remote location and brutally raped by the two men (even though she described them as tennagers).

If a woman is raped she has every right and a duty to tell the world what happened and hope that justice will be served. But when women use rape as a get out of jail free card, only to put someone else in prison, it defiles every woman who has been raped and destroys the reputation of the accused, real or imaginary.

This isn’t the first time a woman has lied about rape and it will not be the last time. But it does appear that this type of reaction is becoming more prevalent in society. Morningood’s case is that of a liar getting caught in a lie and attempting to lie her way out the situation. Not every case is this clear-cut and at times the false allegation of rape does not have such sinister intent – just read this bizarre story from Australia.

With our now rampant “culture of rape”, who becomes the victim?

GAIL Sherwood, a mother-of-three who falsely claimed to have been raped, has been found guilty of three counts of perverting the course of justice.

Sherwood, 52, of Yew Tree Way, Thrupp, twice claimed she had been raped and also accused a man of stalking her.

During a six week trial, Bristol Crown Court heard she had been found tied up and had also sent text messages to friends saying she was in trouble.

Sherwood told the court she had been stalked by a man with whom she had been involved in a minor road traffic collision on April 12, 2008.

This led to the arrest of the man, who was detained for 20 hours before being released without charge.

Next, Sherwood told police she was dragged into woods by a man with a weapon who then raped her as she returned to her car from walking her dogs at Haresfield Beacon on April 25, 2008.

On June 1, 2008, Sherwood claimed she was hit over the head, taken to a remote spot in the grounds of Nether Lypiatt Manor, the former home of Princess Michael of Kent, and raped.

On one occasion, she was found naked from the waist down with gaffer tape over her mouth and her hands tied behind her, the court heard.

A police helicopter located her half-naked behind a fence on another occasion.

In court, Sherwood said police had lied to her and had manipulated the evidence.

Police arrested Sherwood on June 18, 2008 after a covert camera disproved her claim of being kidnapped from her home on June 1.

Rather than being dragged from her house against her will, the video showed her calmly leaving her property by herself.

The court heard Sherwood, who has always maintained her innocence, told police in an interview how a man had called her mobile phone and then stalked her in his van through villages near Stroud.

On Friday, a jury found her guilty of all three counts of perverting the course of justice.

She was released on bail and will be sentenced on Thursday, March 4.

Speaking outside the court, Detective Chief Inspector Paul Shorrock, of Gloucestershire police, said: “Ms Sherwood has wasted significant police time and resources with these false allegations but what is most upsetting is the way a false claim such as this completely undermines those people whose lives have been devastated by genuine crimes of this nature.”

Commenting on the verdict, a spokesman for Women Against Rape said: “We are shocked at today’s verdict. Our belief in her innocence remains unshaken.”

To view the original story, go to Stroud News and Journal

AN ex-heroin addict who twice knifed her partner got him arrested and locked up as well after she claimed he had raped her.