Posts by The Innocence Project

Innocent Man Released from Prison After 26 Years, Two Lawyers Kept His Innocence Secret
Posted by The Innocence Project, The Innocence Blog on April 22, 2008 at 5:37 AM.

Alton Logan served 26 years in Illinois prison for murder before he was released on Friday based on new evidence of his innocence. While DNA evidence is not involved, Logan joins a vast group of people released from prison years after an apparent wrongful conviction. His family members collected $1,000 for bond in the courthouse lobby on Friday and he is now awaiting a decision from the Illinois Attorney General on whether to retry him.

Logan was convicted of a 1982 murder in a McDonald's restaurant and sentenced to life in prison, narrowly avoiding the death penalty. His release was sparked by an affidavit provided by two Illinois attorneys, revealing that their client in another murder case, Andrew Wilson, had confessed to them that he committed the McDonald's murder alone. The confession came before Logan was sentenced in the case. The attorneys had Wilson sign an affidavit admitting his guilt, but kept it locked away because they weren't allowed to break attorney-client privilege. Wilson told them they could release the affidavit if he died, and he passed away last year in prison.

CBS News' "60 Minutes" reported on the case last month, including interviews with Logan and Wilson's two lawyers, one of whom says in the interview that he thought about Logan's case almost every day for 26 years, but he felt obligated to maintain his attorney-client privilege with Wilson.

"There might be other attorneys who have similar secrets that they're keeping," attorney Jamie Kunz said. "What makes this case so different is that (we) came forward… and (talked) to Wilson before his death, and get his permission: 'If you die, can we talk?' Without that, we wouldn't be here today."

But Logan says in a prison interview that he can't understand why the two attorneys didn't release the information sooner. He also says the system is built to convict people and often misses the truth.

"They are quick to convict, but they are slow to correct their mistakes," Logan said.

The "60 Minutes" segment is a must-see for anyone interested in the issue of wrongful convictions. Watch it here.

How Many Innocent People Are Really Behind Bars?
Posted by The Innocence Project, The Innocence Blog on March 27, 2008 at 7:23 AM.

A recent article in the New York Times asks a question often heard by the Innocence Project: How many people convicted in the United States are innocent?

Observers from across the criminal justice system have weighed in.

Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, has found the rate of wrongful conviction in death row cases to be somewhere between 2.3 and 5 percent.

A recent review of biological evidence in 31 randomly chosen Virginia cases led to DNA testing that could yield results in 22 cases, two of which resulted in exonerations –- a small sample size but an indicator that the rate could be as high as 9 percent.

A couple of years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited questionable and discredited calculations from Oregon Prosecutor Joshua Marquis (who divided the number of DNA exonerations by the total number of felony convictions) to make his claim that the wrongful conviction rate is .027 percent. As Gross points in a recent law review article: "By this logic, we could estimate the proportion of baseball players who’ve used steroids by dividing the number of major league players who've been caught by the total of all baseball players at all levels: major league, minor league, semipro, college and Little League -- and maybe throwing in football and basketball players as well."

The Times article notes that while there is disagreement about which calculations might help suggest the magnitude of the problem, there is a consensus that nobody really knows how many innocent people are in prison –- and we may never know.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »