WThe Massacre of Alcamo Marina refers to a double murder that occurred on 27 January 1976 in a Carabinieri station at Alcamo Marina, situated in the province of Trapani in the Italian island of Sicily. In the middle of the night, unknown gunmen broke into the station and shot dead two Carabinieri officers. Initially the Red Brigades were suspected, although they denied having anything to do with the attack, but eventually some youngsters from the area, including Giuseppe Gulotta, were arrested and convicted, and then absolved after more than 30 years. The Gulotta case represents one of the worst cases of miscarriage of justice and unjust detention in Italian history: Gulotta spent 22 years in jail and was then acquitted during a revisal of the trial, which took place after one of the Carabinieri officers involved in the investigation admitted that Gulotta's confession was obtained through torture and intimidation.
WJoe Arridy was a young American man known for having been falsely accused, wrongfully convicted, and wrongfully executed for the 1936 rape and murder of Dorothy Drain, a 15-year-old girl in Pueblo, Colorado. He was manipulated by the police to make a false confession due to his mental incapacities. Arridy was severely mentally disabled and was 23 years old when he was executed on January 6, 1939.
WSture Ragnar Bergwall, also known as Thomas Quick in 1993–2002, is a Swedish man previously believed to have been a serial killer, having confessed to more than 30 murders while incarcerated in a mental institution for personality disorders. Between 1994 and 2001, Quick was convicted of eight of these murders. However, he withdrew all of his confessions in 2008, as a result of which his murder convictions were quashed, the final one in July 2013, and he was released from hospital. The episode raised issues about how murder convictions could have been obtained on such weak evidence, and has been called the largest miscarriage of justice in Swedish history. Journalists Hannes Råstam and Dan Josefsson published TV documentaries and books about the murder cases; they claimed that bad therapy led to false confessions. Dan Josefsson claims that a "cult"-like group led by psychologist Margit Norell manipulated the police and talked Sture Bergwall into false confessions.
WFernando Bermudez was a New York City resident who was exonerated in 2009 after being convicted in 1992 of the second-degree murder of a 16-year-old boy in New York City's Greenwich Village. He was sentenced to 23 years to life. His conviction was overturned on appeal by a New York County Supreme Court justice who also ordered Bermudez released, and dismissed the charges with prejudice. Bermudez serves as a guest speaker for the Innocence Project as well as Represent Justice.
WDavid Ray Camm is a former trooper of the Indiana State Police who spent 13 years in prison after twice being wrongfully convicted of the murders of his wife, Kimberly, and his children, Brad (7) and Jill (5), at their home in Georgetown, Indiana, on September 28, 2000. He was released from custody in 2013 after his third trial resulted in an acquittal.
WAngela Cannings was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the UK in 2002 for the murder of her seven-week-old son, Jason, who died in 1991, and of her 18-week-old son Matthew, who died in 1999. Her first child, Gemma, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 1989 at the age of 13 weeks, although she was never charged in connection with Gemma's death.
WRubin "Hurricane" Carter was an American-Canadian middleweight boxer, wrongfully convicted of murder and later released following a petition of habeas corpus after serving almost 20 years in prison.
WAlice Lynne "Lindy" Chamberlain-Creighton is a New Zealand-born woman who was wrongfully convicted in one of Australia's most publicised murder trials. Accused of killing her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, while camping at Uluru in 1980, she maintained that she saw a dingo leave the tent where Azaria was sleeping. The prosecution case was circumstantial and depended on forensic evidence.
WJabbar Collins is an American man who served 16 years for a crime he did not commit. He was convicted of second-degree murder following the February 1994 death of Orthodox rabbi Abraham Pollack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The 20-year-old Collins, who lived in a nearby housing project, was arrested and charged with the murder. In March 1995, he was sentenced by a jury to 34-years-to-life in prison, sixteen of which he served.
WClarence Arnold Elkins Sr. is an American man who was convicted wrongfully of the 1998 rape and murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and the rape and assault of his wife's niece, Brooke. He was convicted solely on the basis of the testimony of his wife's 6-year-old niece who testified that Elkins was the perpetrator.
WTimothy John Evans was a Welshman wrongfully accused of the murder of his wife and infant daughter at their residence at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London. In January 1950, Evans was tried and convicted for the murder of his daughter, and he was executed by hanging in March of the same year.
WRyan W. Ferguson is an American who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high school student.
WJohn Gordon was the last person executed by Rhode Island. His conviction and execution have been ascribed by researchers to anti-Roman Catholic and anti-Irish immigrant bias. As a result, he was posthumously pardoned in 2011.
WAnthony Charles Graves is the 138th exonerated death row inmate in America. With no record of violence, he was arrested at 26 years old, wrongfully convicted, and incarcerated for 18 years before finally being exonerated and released. He was awarded $1.4 million for the time he spent imprisoned, and the prosecutor who put him in prison was ultimately disbarred for concealing exculpatory evidence and using false testimony in the case.
WAnthony Ray Hinton is an American activist, writer, and author who was wrongly convicted of the 1985 murders of two fast food restaurant managers in Birmingham, Alabama. Hinton was sentenced to death and held on the state's death row for 28 years, and was later released in 2015.
WTeresa Elena De Simone was murdered in Southampton, England, in 1979. Her murder led to one of the longest proven cases of a miscarriage of justice in English legal history. The murder occurred outside the Tom Tackle pub and was the subject of a three-year police investigation which resulted in the arrest of Sean Hodgson. Over the course of his 15-day trial it was not revealed that Hodgson was a pathological liar and had confessed to numerous crimes, including some that he could not have committed and others that did not appear to have happened. Hodgson was convicted of the murder by a unanimous jury verdict in 1982 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving 27 years in prison he was exonerated and released in March 2009. DNA analysis of semen samples that had been preserved from the original crime scene showed that they could not have come from him.
WThomas Kapatos, nicknamed as "The Greek", was a New York City mobster and an enforcer to Mickey Spillane during his war against Jimmy Coonan during the 1960s.
WGünther Kaufmann was a German film actor best known for his association with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder directed Kaufmann in a total of 14 films, casting him in leading and minor roles. Kaufmann was also romantically involved with the director for a time.
WThe murder of Lesley Molseed, an 11-year-old British girl, occurred on 5 October 1975 in West Yorkshire, England. Stefan Kiszko, an intellectually disabled young man who lived near Molseed in Greater Manchester, was wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering her, and served 16 years in prison before the conviction was overturned. Kiszko's mental and physical condition deteriorated while he was in prison, and he died 20 months after his release in 1992, before he could collect money owed to him for his suffering. His ordeal was described by one British MP as "the worst miscarriage of justice of all time." Evidence that Kiszko could not have committed the crime was suppressed by three members of the investigation team, who were initially arrested in 1993 before charges were dropped. In 2006, however, a DNA match led to the arrest of Ronald Castree for Molseed's murder. He was convicted the following year and sentenced to life in prison.
WAmanda Marie Knox is an American woman who spent almost four years in an Italian prison following her conviction for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student who shared her apartment. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation.
WChief Leschi was a chief of the Nisqually Indian Tribe of southern Puget Sound, Washington, primarily in the area of the Nisqually River.
WKaj Johannes Linna, né Kaj Juhani Kaukosalo, is a Finnish man who was sentenced to life imprisonment for a robbery-murder in Kalamark outside of Piteå, Sweden on 14 April 2004. He served the longest overturned sentence in Swedish history before a retrial was ordered, in which he was exonerated and freed. He was later awarded 18 million SEK as compensation for his time in prison, a record sum.
WBruce Lisker is an American who at age 17 was wrongly arrested, tried, and convicted for the March 10, 1983 murder of his adoptive mother Dorka, 66, in the family's Sherman Oaks residence.
WRaymond McCartney is an Irish former Sinn Féin politician, and a former hunger striker and volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).
WSakae Menda was a Japanese man who was convicted of a double homicide, in 1948, but was later exonerated by retrial in 1983. This was the first time anyone was ever released from death row by retrial in Japan. He is now a leading figure in Japan for the movement to abolish the death penalty.
WFritz Yngvar Moen was a Norwegian man wrongfully convicted of two distinct murders, serving a total of 18 years in prison. After the convictions were quashed, an official inquiry was instigated to establish what had gone wrong in the authorities' handling of the case, and on 25 June 2007 the commission delivered harsh criticism to the police, the prosecution and the courts in what was immediately termed Norway's worst miscarriage of justice of all time.
WMichael Morton is an American who was wrongfully convicted in 1987 in a Williamson County, Texas court of the 1986 murder of his wife Christine Morton. He spent nearly 25 years in prison before he was exonerated by DNA evidence which supported his claim of innocence and pointed to the crime being committed by another individual. Morton was released from prison on October 4, 2011, and another man, Mark Alan Norwood, was convicted of the murder in 2013. The prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, was convicted of contempt of court for withholding evidence after the judge had ordered its release to the defense.
WElmer "Geronimo" Pratt, also known as Geronimo Ji-Jaga and Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, was a decorated military veteran and a high-ranking member of the Black Panther Party in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Born in Louisiana, he served two tours in Vietnam, receiving several decorations. He moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at UCLA under the GI Bill and joined the Black Panther Party.
WThe Quincy Five were a group of five young African American men from Quincy, Florida, who were charged with the 1970 murder of a Leon County deputy sheriff. The men – Johnny Lee Burns, Alphonso Figgers, Johnny Frederick, Dave Roby Keaton Jr. and David Charles Smith Jr. – were convicted on May 6, 1971. All were sentenced to death or given life sentences, even though at least two of them were teenagers and had never previously been accused of any crime. They were exonerated and pardoned in 1972 after many months of deliberation.
WJuan A. Rivera Jr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted three times for the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Illinois. He was convicted twice on the basis of a confession that he said was coerced. No physical evidence linked him to the crime scene. In 2015 he received a $20 million settlement from Lake County, Illinois for wrongful conviction, formerly the largest settlement of its kind in United States history.
WColin Campbell Eadie Ross was an Australian wine-bar owner convicted of the murder of a child, which became known as the Gun Alley Murder, and executed despite evidence that he was innocent. Following his execution, efforts were made to clear his name, but it was not until the 1990s that the key evidence was re-examined using modern forensic techniques, strongly indicating that Ross was innocent. As a result, an appeal for mercy was made to Victoria's Chief Justice in 2006, and on 27 May 2008 the Governor of Victoria pardoned Ross, in what is believed to be an Australian legal first.
WThe murder of Linda Cook was committed in Portsmouth on 9 December 1986. The subsequent trial led to a miscarriage of justice when Michael Shirley, an 18-year-old Royal Navy sailor, was wrongly convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992 his case was highlighted as one of 110 possible miscarriages of justice in a report presented to the Home Office by the National Association of Probation Officers and justice groups Liberty and Conviction. His conviction was eventually quashed in 2003 by the Court of Appeal after the DNA profile extracted from semen samples recovered from the victim's body was proven not to be his. Cook's murder took place shortly after six sexual assaults had been committed in the Buckland area of the city, and the killer was initially dubbed the Beast of Buckland by the news media. When police revealed that footprint evidence had been recovered and launched a search for matching shoes, the case became known as the "Cinderella murder". Because of the brutal nature of the murder and the preceding sex attacks, Hampshire police were under public pressure to quickly make an arrest.
WOscar Joseph Slater was the victim of Scotland's worst ever miscarriage of justice. Wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, he was freed after almost two decades of hard labour at Scotland’s HM Prison Peterhead through the efforts of multiple journalists, lawyers, and writers, including Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
WGeorge Junius Stinney Jr., was a 14-year-old African-American boy who was convicted, in a proceeding later vacated as an unfair trial in 2014, of murdering two white girls, Betty June Binnicker, age 11, and Mary Emma Thames, age 7, in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was executed by electric chair in June 1944. Stinney is the youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed since Hannah Ocuish in 1786.
WRobert Lee Stinson is an innocent Wisconsin man that was charged with the rape and murder of 63-year-old woman, Ione Cychosz. Cychosz’ body was discovered in a vacant lot close to Stinson's backyard. Bite marks, that were left on the body, were analyzed by Dr. Lowell T. Johnson, a forensic dentist, who advised that the bites were left by someone missing their front tooth. Due to Richard Lee Stinson's proximity and Dr. Johnson's testimony, that was later analyzed by Dr. Raymond Rawson, he was sentenced to life in prison.
WBlessed Thomas Whitbread was an English Jesuit missionary, wrongly convicted of conspiracy to murder Charles II of England. He was beatified in 1929.