EXONERATIONS IN 2015
The National Registry of Exonerations
February 3, 2016

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
•

A RECORD NUMBER OF EXONERATIONS
2015 set a record for exonerations in the United States—149 that we know of so far, in
29 states, the District of Columbia, federal courts and Guam. This record continues a trend:
the rate of exonerations has been increasing rapidly for several years. The 149 defendants
who were exonerated in 2015 had served on average about 14-and-a-half years in prison.

•

THE CRIMES
Homicides: A record 58 defendants were exonerated in homicide cases in 2015, 54 for
murder and 4 for manslaughter. They came from 25 states and the District of Columbia.
More than two-thirds were minorities, including half who were African American.
Drug Cases: 47 defendants were exonerated of drug possession in 2015—also a record; 42
of them had pled guilty in Harris County, Texas (Houston).

•

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CASES
False Confessions: 27 exonerations in 2015 were for convictions based on false
confessions, another record. More than 80% of these false confessions were in homicide
cases (22/27), mostly by defendants who were under 18 or mentally handicapped or both.
Official Misconduct: We know of official misconduct in 65 exonerations in 2015, a record
number. Three-quarters of homicide exonerations in 2015 included known official
misconduct (44/58).
Guilty Pleas: 65 exonerations in 2015 were for convictions based on guilty pleas, more than
any previous year. The great majority were drug cases (46/65), but eight were homicide
exonerations—all of which included false confessions.

EXONERATIONS IN 2015

No-Crime Cases: A record 75 exonerations in 2015 were cases in which no crime actually
occurred. Almost two-thirds were drug cases (48/75), but six were murder convictions and
14 were convictions for other violent felonies.
•

CONVICTION INTEGRITY UNITS
A Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) is a division of a prosecutorial office that works to
prevent, identify and correct false convictions. There were 24 CIUs in the United States in
2015, double the number in 2013 and quadruple the number in 2011.
A record 58 CIU-exonerations took place in 2015. Overall, CIUs have helped secure 151
exonerations from 2003 through 2015; nearly three-quarters occurred in 2014 and 2015
(109/151).
The performance of these CIUs has been highly variable and some have been criticized as
mere window dressing.
♦
♦
♦

•

Nearly half of CIU exonerations come from one office (Harris County, TX) (76/151),
and almost 90% (134/151) occurred in four counties.
Half of all CIUs have not been involved in any exonerations—and four others worked
on one only—including several units that have existed for three to five years.
Several CIUs have no contact information that’s publicly available on the web or by
telephone, including some that have been in operation for years.

COMMENTS
Exonerations are now common. Not long ago, any exoneration we heard about was major
news. Now it’s a familiar story. We average nearly three exonerations a week, and most get
little attention.
There are now many more exonerations in contexts where they used to be rare, in
particular, in cases with innocent defendants who falsely confessed or pled guilty.
The proliferation of Conviction Integrity Units reflects a recognition that convicting the
innocent is a serious public problem that requires proactive government attention.
But progress so far is a drop in the bucket. This is not a problem that’s limited to a few
counties. By any reasonable accounting, there are tens of thousands of false convictions each
year across the country, and many more that have accumulated over the decades.

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EXONERATIONS IN 2015
The National Registry of Exonerations
February 3, 2016
2015 was a record-breaking year for exonerations in the United States.
The National Registry of Exonerations has recorded 149 exonerations in 2015. The exonerated
defendants had served, on average, more than 14 years in prison.
The previous record—139 exonerations—was set the year before, in 2014. All told, the National
Registry of Exonerations has recorded 1,733 known exonerations in the United States since 1989
(as of January 27, 2016).
Last year’s record is part of a striking trend. Since 2011, the annual number of exonerations has
more than doubled. We now average nearly three exonerations a week. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Number of Exonerations per Year
2010 – 2015
160
140
120
100
80
60
2011

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2012

2013

2014

2015

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EXONERATIONS IN 2015

Most of the exonerations in 2015 came from opposite ends of the spectrum of criminal conduct:
•

Homicide: A record 58 defendants who were exonerated in 2015—39% of the total—had
been convicted of homicide. Five had been sentenced to death, 19 to life (usually without
parole), and the rest to decades in prison.

•

Drug possession: 47 exonerations in 2015—about a third of the total— involved drug
possession, also a record number. The defendants had received sentences ranging from 2
years in jail to community service.

The exonerations in 2015 set several other records as well. They include more cases than any
previous year in which:
♦
♦
♦
♦
♦

Defendants Falsely Confessed;
Government Officials committed Misconduct;
The convictions were based on Guilty Pleas;
No-Crime fact occurred; or
A prosecutorial Conviction Integrity Unit worked on the exoneration.

We will first describe some basic patterns across all 149 known exonerations in 2015, then
focus on homicides and drug cases, in the context of these five factors, and last discuss
Conviction Integrity Units.

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I. Basic Patterns
•

Exonerations by Jurisdiction. There were exonerations in 2015 in 29 states and the District
of Columbia, plus three federal cases and one exoneration in Guam. The states with the most
exonerations are, in order: Texas, New York, Illinois, Alaska, North Carolina, Alabama,
California, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. See Table 1 for a
complete list.
Table 1: Exonerations in 2015 by Jurisdiction (n=149)
Texas – 54

Wisconsin – 4

Ohio – 2

Mississippi – 1

New York – 17

Florida – 3

Georgia – 2

Montana – 1

Illinois – 13

Pennsylvania – 3

Delaware – 1

Oregon – 1

Alaska – 6

Virginia – 3

Arizona – 1

South Carolina – 1

North Carolina – 5

Dist. of Columbia – 2

Kansas – 1

South Dakota – 1

California – 5

Massachusetts – 2

Louisiana – 1

Washington – 1

Alabama – 4

Missouri – 2

Maine – 1

Federal – 3

Connecticut – 4

Nevada – 2

Michigan – 1

Guam – 1

These numbers do not, for the most part, reflect the frequency of false conviction across
jurisdictions. For example, California, with a population of 37 million, had 5 exonerations in
2015, while New York, with 19 million people, had 17 exonerations—and Texas, with 25
million, had 54. An obvious explanation for these differences is that more false convictions
were found in New York and Texas, in large part because of the efforts of prosecutorial
Conviction Integrity Units in Brooklyn, New York (8 exonerations in 2015) and Harris
County, Texas (42 exonerations).
Death sentences. Five defendants who had been sentenced to death were exonerated in 2015:
one each in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. They had been imprisoned
for 30, 25, 28, 19 and 10 years, respectively. The number of new death sentences in the
United States has plummeted in recent years and the number of executions is at a 20-year
low, 1 but it appears that among the thousands of death sentenced defendants who remain in
prison, there are still many who were convicted in error. 2
•

1
2

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DNA and non-DNA Exonerations. Twenty-six exonerations in 2015 were based in whole
or in part on DNA identification evidence, 17% of the total. Overall, DNA exonerations now
account for 24% of the exonerations in the Registry (419/1,733).
See: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/.
See: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230.full.pdf+html?with-ds=yes.
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•

The crimes for which the defendants were convicted. Most exonerations in 2015 were for
violent crimes, especially homicide (39%) and adult and child sexual assaults (10%). The
great majority of exonerations for non-violent crimes were drug possession and distribution
cases. Table 2 lists exonerations in 2015 by the most serious crime for which the exonerees
were convicted:
Table 2: Exonerations in 2015 by Crime
Homicide
Murder

58 (39%)
54

Death sentences
5
Other murder convictions 49

Manslaughter

4

Sexual Assaults
Sexual assault on an adult
Child sex abuse

15 (10%)
10
5

Other Violent Crimes
Robbery
Attempted murder
Assault
Arson
Kidnapping
Other Violent Felonies

Non-Violent Crimes
Drug crimes
Gun Possession
Theft/Stolen Property
Sex Offender Registration
Burglary/Unlawful Entry
Miscellaneous

TOTAL

15 (10%)
4
2
3
1
3
2

61 (41%)
51
2
1
2
3
2

149 (100%)

II. Homicide—Unmaking Murderers
Homicide exonerations set a new record in 2015—58—up from 51 in 2014: 54 cases of murder,
four of manslaughter. There were homicide exonerations in 25 states and the District of
Columbia, but only Illinois (11), New York (9) and Alaska (4) had more than three each.
Fifty-five of the homicide exonerees are men and three are women. Half are African American
(29/58), 31% white (18/58), 10% Hispanic (6/58) and 9% Native American or Asian (5/58). The

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defendants’ age at the time of the crime ranged from 14 to 54. Eight were under 18 years old and
23 were under 20.
Five of the exonerated homicide defendants had been sentenced to death; 14 were sentenced to
life in prison without the possibility of parole; five others were sentenced to life with the
possibility of parole; and the rest were sentenced to prison for terms ranging from 5 to 120 years
and averaging 37 years. They spent an average of almost 18 years in prison before they were
released.
The most striking thing about these exonerations, however, is the nature of the underlying
convictions. The list of exonerations in 2015 includes record numbers of homicide cases with
false confessions and official misconduct, with convictions based on guilty pleas, and cases in
which no crime in fact occurred.
•

False Confessions. A record 27 exonerations in 2015 were for convictions based on false
confessions, and more than 80% of them were homicides. Twenty-two of 27 false confession
exonerations in 2015 were homicides—39% of all homicide exonerations in 2015—more
than any previous year.
Most of the homicide exonerees who falsely confessed were less than 18 years old or
suffered from mental illness or intellectual disability, or both (13/22). For example:
In 2006, Bobby Johnson, a barely-literate 16-year-old with an IQ of 69, was
interrogated by two New Haven, Connecticut detectives about the murder of
Herbert Fields. The detectives told Johnson (falsely) that they had physical
evidence tying him to the murder and that he would face the death penalty if
convicted (also a lie). They promised him probation if he confessed. Johnson did
confess and was convicted and sentenced to 38 years. He was exonerated in 2015,
nine years later, after it was discovered that the police had concealed evidence
that identified the real killer.

•

Official Misconduct. Seventy-five percent of homicide exonerations in 2015 included
official misconduct (44/58). That proportion is even higher among cases with false
confessions: 82% of homicide exonerations in 2015 with false confessions also involved
misconduct by government officials (18/22). Bobby Johnson’s case was one of those. Debra
Milke’s was another:
In 1990, Debra Milke was sentenced to death in Phoenix for conspiring with the
two men who abducted and murdered her four-year old son, ostensibly in order to
collect on a $5,000 insurance policy. The only substantial evidence against her
was testimony by Detective Armando Saldate, Jr., who was sent to interrogate her
with an explicit order to record the interrogation—which he did not do. Saldate
told the jury that Milke flashed her breasts at him, offered sex, and then later
confessed to the murder. Milke denied it all. Milke was exonerated in 2015
because her attorneys eventually discovered that the state had concealed Saldate’s

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extraordinary history. It turned out that Saldate (in addition to other types of
misconduct) was responsible for four earlier cases in which judges tossed out
confessions or indictments because he committed perjury, and four other cases in
which judges suppressed confessions or vacated convictions because Saldate
violated the constitution in conducting interrogations.
•

Guilty pleas. Exonerations in cases in which defendants pled guilty used to be rare, but they
have become more common in the last seven years and much more so in the past two years.
In 2015, 44% of all exonerations (65/148) were in guilty plea cases, more than any previous
year. Most guilty pleas occurred in drug possession exonerations; we’ll talk about them in the
next section. In this section we address the eight homicide exonerations in 2015 that were
based on guilty pleas—again, a record number for any year.
All eight guilty-plea homicide exonerations included false confessions; six of the eight also
included official misconduct. Bobby Johnson’s case was one of those; he pled guilty to
murder in July 2007. Shawn Whirl’s case was another:
In 1991, Shawn Whirl pled guilty to first-degree murder in Chicago to avoid facing
the death penalty. He had confessed to murdering cab driver Billy Williams. In 2011
Whirl’s lawyers presented evidence that in fact Whirl had been attacked and chased
by another man and managed to escape in Williams’ cab, and that his assailant later
killed Williams in retaliation for rescuing Whirl. In 2012 the Illinois Torture Inquiry
and Relief Commission found that Whirl had been tortured into confessing by a
subordinate of the notorious Chicago Police Lieutenant Jon Burge, who by then was
serving a federal prison sentence for lying about his role in the systematic torture of
numerous suspects. Whirl was exonerated in October 2015, after the Illinois
Appellate Court reversed his conviction.

•

No-Crime Cases. A record 75 exonerations in 2015 were cases in which we now know that
no crime actually occurred, half of the total (75/149). As with guilty-plea exonerations, most
no-crime exonerations were drug possession cases (48/74), which we will get to below. Here
we will discuss the six exonerations that involved homicide convictions in cases in which no
crime in fact occurred, also a record number. Five of the six no-crime homicide exonerations
were arson-murder convictions in which advances in science demonstrated that the original
evidence that the fire was arson proved nothing. For example:
In 1981, Raymond Mora, William Vasquez and Amaury Villalobo were convicted on
six counts of murder each for setting a fire in Brooklyn that killed a mother and her
five children. The evidence against them consisted of testimony from a fire marshal
that the fire had multiple points of origin and was started with accelerants, and from
the building’s owner that she saw the defendants leave the building just before the fire
exploded. In 2015, lawyers for the defendants presented evidence to the Brooklyn
District Attorney’s office that fire scientists now know that the evidence the fire
marshal relied on does not prove arson. The Brooklyn DA’s conviction integrity unit

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picked up the investigation and learned that the building’s owner had admitted she
lied when she testified that she saw the defendants at the fire. In December of last
year the DA’s office moved to dismiss the charges.
In 1992 the National Fire Protection Association issued a major report, NFPA 921, Guide for
Fire and Explosion. NFPA 921 marks a dividing line between arson investigations based on
the personal experience of investigators and investigations based on scientific principles and
data. 3 All five of the 2015 no-crime exonerations in arson-murder cases were for convictions
that occurred 25 to 34 years earlier, before NFPA 921.
It’s taken some time for the major changes brought about by NFPA 921 to persuade courts to
reconsider arson findings that are unsupported by scientific evidence. There have been 22
exonerations since 1989 in which defendants were cleared because new scientific evidence
has undermined earlier findings of arson—8 arson convictions and 14 arson-murder
convictions. The pace seems to be picking up. Half of the no-arson exonerations have been in
the last four years, and nearly a quarter (5 of 22) in 2015 alone—again, a record.
•

Conviction Integrity Units. Conviction Integrity Units (CIUs) in seven counties were
involved in a record 58 exonerations in 2015, seven more than 2014, the next leading year.
Forty-two of the CIU exonerations in 2015—72%—were drug-conviction guilty-plea cases
from Harris County, Texas, which we discuss in the next section. But 12 CIU exonerations
in 2015 were homicides, half of them in Brooklyn—including the arson-murder exonerations
of Mora, Vasquez and Villalobo.

III. Drug Cases
This is the second straight year with record numbers of exonerations in drug cases: 42 in 2014
and 51 in 2015. In both years, the great majority of drug exonerations were CIU cases from
Harris County (Houston) Texas—74% in 2014 (31/42) and 82% in 2015 (42/51).
We described these exonerations a year ago, in our report on Exonerations in 2014. Here’s a
brief summary:
In early 2014 Deputy District Attorney Inger Chandler, the newly assigned head
of the Harris County District Attorney’s Post Conviction Review Section (the
county CIU), noticed that her office was processing a steady trickle of cases in
which defendants pled guilty to possession of illegal drugs, and then, months or
years later, a report from the crime lab would reveal that the materials seized from
the defendant contained no controlled substances. She investigated and found that
there were many more such cases waiting in the wings, and that they were being
handled haphazardly and slowly.
3

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See Fred Durso, Guided by Science, NFPA Journal, March-April 2014.
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In mid-2014, the Post Conviction Review Section embarked on a program to
address these problems. The handling of all cases of defendants who were cleared
by drug tests after pleading guilty was centralized in that section, the process was
streamlined, and the section began to address the backlog of cases from past
years.
The upshot has been 73 drug-crime exonerations by the Post Conviction Review Section
since mid-2014. There are likely to be many more to come; some 200 additional guiltyplea drug conviction cases with lab reports indicating no illegal drugs are still being
processed.
Why did these defendants plead guilty? Inger Chandler offers two explanations: some probably
thought the pills or powders they were carrying contained illegal drugs when in fact they didn’t;
others—especially defendants with criminal records, who generally cannot post the
comparatively high bails that are set for them and who risk substantial terms in prison if
convicted—agreed to attractive plea bargains at their initial court appearances, despite their
innocence, rather than remain in pretrial custody and risk years in prison.
There is some evidence that pretrial detention and the fear of long terms of imprisonment did
influence these false guilty pleas. Twenty of the 25 Harris County drug exonerees who pled
guilty to significant terms of imprisonment (3 months to 7 years) had felony records that we
know about, while 15 of the 23 who had no known criminal records got no time in jail at all.
In 41 of the 73 drug crime exonerations in Harris County the defendants were arrested on the
basis of “field tests” that indicated the presence of controlled substances. (In the other cases the
arresting officers mistook an innocent white powder for cocaine, a hand-rolled cigarette for
marijuana or non-prescription pills for controlled drugs.) Commonly-used drug field tests are
notoriously unreliable; they routinely misidentify everything from Jolly Ranchers to chalk to
motor oil as illegal drugs. 4 They are inadmissible as evidence in court but sufficient to justify an
arrest and they may convince an innocent defendant that she is bound to be convicted at trial.
The Harris County drug guilty-plea exonerations are a window into the world of plea bargaining
in misdemeanors and comparatively light felonies across the country.
The Harris County CIU has done an excellent job of addressing the problem of false guilty pleas
in drug cases. Testing after guilty pleas has been sped up, and the DA’s office will no longer
offer plea bargains in drug cases without lab tests unless the bargain includes no further
incarceration.
Some prosecutorial offices in other counties may also require testing before they will engage in
plea bargaining in drug cases, but we know of no other office that systematically tests suspected
4

See Randy Balko, A partial list of things that field testing drug kits have mistakenly identified as contraband, The
Washington Post, February 26, 2015.
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drugs after guilty pleas and dismisses all convictions that are not supported by the test results. In
most jurisdictions, forensic drug testing is rarely done, if ever, once a defendant has pled guilty.
And if testing is done and no illegal drugs are found, the results may well be lost or ignored, as
many were in Harris County until last year.
But even if the Harris County CIU’s procedures became common practice, there’s a larger
problem that’s much less tractable: What about innocent defendants who plead guilty to other
misdemeanors and low-level felonies—assault, shoplifting, breaking and entering—in order to
avoid pretrial detention and the risk of long terms of imprisonment after trial? Or innocent drug
defendants who plead guilty to possession of actual illegal drugs that belong to someone else?
There is no cheap, reliable test for guilt or innocence in those cases. Very few such convictions
ever result in exoneration, but the number of false convictions involved probably dwarfs the
number for the serious violent felonies that make up the bulk of the exonerations in the Registry.

IV. Conviction Integrity Units
A Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) is a division of a prosecutorial office that works to prevent,
identify and remedy false convictions. In our report on exonerations in 2014, we discussed the
rapid growth in the number of CIUs and CIU exonerations from 2007 through 2014. These trends
have continued. Six new CIUs began operation in 2015, bringing the total to 24. See Figure 5:

30
25

Figure 5: Number of Conviction Integrity Units in Opertation by
Year

20
15
10
5
0
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

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Conviction Integrity Units 5 have been involved in 152 exonerations (including one so far in
2016), mostly in the last two years. A record 58 of these CIU exonerations occurred in 2015.
See Figure 6:
70

Figure 6: Number of CIU Exonerations by Year
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

In Table A in the Appendix, we summarize a great deal of information about these units
including the numbers, dates and crimes of any exonerations they participated in. As Table A
shows, the 151 CIU exonerations through 2015 are very unevenly distributed among the offices.
Nearly half are drug-crime guilty plea cases from Harris County (73/151), and almost 90%
(134/151) occurred in four counties: Harris (76), Dallas (25), Brooklyn (20) and Cook (13).
In our Report a year ago, we said that “several Conviction Integrity Units have accomplished a
great deal in a short period of time. They may have initiated a fundamental change in the way
false convictions are addressed in the United States, but that remains to be seen.”
Both parts of that statement still apply: A few of the Conviction Integrity Units have indeed
accomplished a lot, and it is still too soon to know how much of a change this trend will produce.
But we can say something about what these units have been doing. (Much of the basis for the
comments that follow is contained in the information presented in Table A in the Appendix.)

5

The Conviction Integrity Units we count are long-term operations that work to prevent, to identify and to remedy
false convictions. These units all operate under the authority of local prosecutors with primary responsibility for
prosecuting crimes in a county or district. Most but not all are called “Conviction Integrity Unit,” the term we use as
a general reference. We have attached a list of the names of the units in the Appendix. We do not include four oneshot projects that we know of that were set up to review particular sets of cases for possible errors: (i) a review of
cases with potentially flawed forensic evidence in Wayne County, Michigan, see Doug Guthrie, “Legal unit to
monitor Detroit gun cases,” Detroit News, December 13, 2008; (ii) a review of homicide cases by the Milwaukee
County DA’s office because of concerns about DNA collection procedure; (iii) a state-wide effort to identify old
cases for DNA testing in Connecticut; and (iv) a similar state-wide project in Colorado.
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•

County Populations. There are over 2,300 local prosecutorial offices in the United States,
serving populations that range from several hundred to several million. Table A shows that
Conviction Integrity Units are concentrated in large counties. The three most populous
counties all have CIUs (Los Angeles, Cook and Harris); so do six of the top 10, 10 of the top
20, and 14 of the top 50.
As we noted last year, a dedicated Conviction Integrity Unit is not feasible in a small office
with only a handful of prosecutors. It makes sense that several CIUs are located in some of
the largest prosecutorial offices in the country. As a result, the 24 offices with CIUs serve
over 45 million people. But there is plenty of room for expansion. So far, only about 15% of
the national population lives in jurisdictions with CIUs, and over 60% of counties with
populations over one million have no CIUs (24/39).

•

Numbers of Exonerations.
♦

The CIU exonerations we list. The CIU exonerations we count are, of course, all
exonerations by the criteria for listing in the Registry. In addition we require that:
“A Conviction Integrity Unit in the prosecutorial office that prosecuted the
exoneree helped secure the exoneration. (This does not necessarily mean that the
prosecutorial office in question made a factual determination that the defendant is
innocent.)”
Since we are not privy to the internal workings of prosecutorial offices, we contacted all
CIUs in counties that have had exonerations to ask which ones they “helped secure.” Our
classifications are based on their designations.
How much the CIU did to help secure the exoneration varies greatly from case to case. At
the high end, for example, Stephen Brodie was exonerated in 2012 in Dallas, 17 years
after he was falsely convicted of child sex abuse, based entirely on an investigation that
was initiated by the Dallas County CIU after Brodie’s father wrote to the unit. Most CIU
exonerations, however, were initially investigated by defense attorneys, innocence
organizations, journalists or others. We leave it to the CIUs themselves to decide whether
their role qualifies under our criteria.
We are puzzled, however, by the position taken on several cases by the Cook County
CIU. For example, in 1989, James Kluppelberg was convicted of arson and murder in a
case that featured a confession that was beaten out of him, eyewitness perjury that was
later recanted, misleading forensic evidence and police and prosecutorial misconduct. In
2009, lawyers for Mr. Kluppelberg filed a petition for relief based on extensive new
evidence of innocence. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office fought the petition for
the next three years until, on May 30, 2012, the prosecution announced that it no longer
believed it could carry its burden of proof of guilt. Nonetheless, the Cook County State’s
Attorney’s CIU describes Kluppelberg’s case as an exoneration that they “helped secure.”

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The description of Nicole Harris’s case is even more baffling. In 2012, seven years after
Harris was convicted of murdering her son, the United States Court of Appeals for the
Seventh Circuit reversed her conviction and ordered a new trial because constitutional
violations had undermined the reliability of the verdict. The Cook County State’s
Attorney’s Office fought that decision as long as it could and only dismissed the case in
June 2013, two weeks after the Supreme Court refused to consider their appeal—a
sequence of events that the Cook County CIU also counts as “helping secure” Harris’s
exoneration. 6
♦

Numbers of CIU exonerations by county. Half of all CIUs have not been involved in
any exoneration (12/24). In part, that’s inevitable. Six CIUs began their operations in
2015 and may need time to get underway. (But three of the six units that were founded in
2015 have already participated in exonerations—those in Bexar, Ventura and New
Orleans.) On the other hand, the CIU in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, has had no
exonerations in five years of existence, those in Nassau and Oneida Counties have had
none in three years, six others have had none in two years, and a few CIUs that had one
or more exonerations in the past have had none for years.
At the other end of the range, three CIU’s have been notably active and successful. The
Dallas CIU has had 25 exonerations for violent felony convictions over the last eight
years. Brooklyn has had 18 CIU exonerations—including 16 murder cases—in the past
two years. And Harris County has had 73 drug crime exonerations since mid-2014.

•

Accessibility. Three indications of accessibility are presented on Table A. Under “Web
Address” we post a link to the Internet address of the CIU or, if we couldn’t find one, say
“None.” And under “Contact Info” we enter a “W” if contact information for the CIU can be
found on the general office web site, and we enter a “P” if we were able to obtain such
information by calling the general access telephone number for the prosecutorial office.
We found web addresses for nine CIUs, all of which could also be located on the general
office web site or by phone or both. Eight CIUs without web addresses could be located on
the office site or by telephone or both; six could not be found by any of these means. (We list
these fields as “Not Applicable” to the New Orleans CIU because it was shut down in
January 2016, as we discuss below.)
This does not mean that these seven units do not exist. We have been in contact with an
attorney in each of these offices and confirmed its existence. Otherwise it would not be
listed. But reaching them was not easy. It required significant research, repeated calls, or,
especially, personal contacts within the offices.

6

We also have doubts about Cook County’s designation of the exonerations of Lewis Gardner, Deon Patrick, Paul
Phillips and Daniel Taylor as CIU cases. In all four cases, public information suggests that the Cook County State’s
Attorney’s Office resisted the exonerations for years before conceding under pressure.
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As a result, it appears that these units are not, as a practical matter, accessible to the public at
large. In particular, innocent criminal defendants who seek exoneration are not likely to be
able to present their cases to these CIUs, unless they can afford to hire lawyers.
Two CIUs that do not post or provide contact information by telephone were founded in
2015 (those in Los Angeles, and Travis counties). Very likely they will make that
information available soon. But four others that are equally difficult to find—those in
Multnomah, Nassau and San Diego counties and in the District of Columbia—have been in
existence for two, three or four years.
Conviction Integrity Units have their critics. Some question the objectivity, commitment and
openness of prosecutors who take on the task of reviewing convictions obtained by their own
colleagues and predecessors. Particular units have been criticized as mere window dressing, or
public relations ploys. 7
Some CIUs with few or no exonerations and little public presence may have focused their efforts
on preventing future wrongful convictions. The Suffolk County CIU, for example, takes partial
credit for a program to reform the practice of obtaining eyewitness identifications. Others—for
example the San Diego County CIU—are now expanding after operating for years with a
minimal staff. That said, we could find little in the records of several CIUs to answer such
criticisms.
A Conviction Integrity Unit is not the only model for a government program that works to
identify and remedy false convictions. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission
(NCIIC) is an independent state-wide agency established in 2006 by the North Carolina state
legislature to investigate and evaluate post-conviction claims of innocence. The commission
makes recommendations to a review board, which in turn may refer cases to a judicial tribunal
which has the power exonerate convicted defendants. In nine years of operation, the NCIIC has
been responsible for nine exonerations.
There’s a lot to be said for agencies like the NCIIC—but there are no other agencies like the
NCIIC in the United States. To create one would require legislative action and substantial
funding by a legislature and a governor. Outside North Carolina, no state has been interested.
CIUs are much easier to create.
One of the striking facts about the American system of criminal justice is the extraordinary
power that we give to prosecutors. They alone decide who to prosecute for criminal offenses,
what charges to bring against them and what punishments to seek. They have unreviewable
7

See, e.g.,Elizabeth Barber, “Dallas targets wrongful convictions, and revolution starts to spread,” Christian Science
Monitor, May 25, 2014; Hella Winston, “Wrongful Convictions: Can Prosecutors Reform Themselves?” The Crime
Report, March 27, 2014.
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power to dismiss criminal charges before trial, or never to file them at all. In practice, that power
extends to convicted defendants as well. If a sitting prosecutor asks the appropriate court to
vacate the judgment and dismiss the charges against a defendant who was convicted in her
jurisdiction one or three or thirty years earlier, it will happen.
This means that the chief prosecutor of any county, on her own, can create a Conviction Integrity
Unit with the power to investigate claims of innocence and exonerate convicted criminal
defendants. The only requirement is a budget, and if the unit is small enough, that’s not much of
a constraint.
In other words, for an elected prosecutor, creating a CIU is an internal organizational choice, like
creating a dedicated unit to deal with appeals or with domestic violence cases. That’s why a mere
seven years after Dallas had the only CIU in the country, we now have 24 CIUs operating in
offices that serve dozens of millions of people.
This unconstrained prosecutorial authority has two sides. On the one hand, it permits rapid
change. On the other hand, it means that a Conviction Integrity Unit will be whatever the
prosecutor in charge makes it, no more, no less. In a few counties, that has led to CIUs that are
important, active on-going operations. In others, we find no evidence that they have done
anything much at all. And in several, it’s too early to say.
One particular point of contention has been the relationship between CIUs and the criminal
defense bar. Two of the most successful CIUs—those in Dallas and Brooklyn—were set up with
close working relations with local defense attorneys, public defenders and innocence
organizations. The Dallas CIU has always been run by an attorney with a background in criminal
defense and innocence work. The Brooklyn CIU was designed with the assistance of a former
public defender, and has an external review panel including defense lawyers.
There’s a lot to be said for these practices, 8 but many CIUs have no formal relations with the
defense bar and no external oversight of any sort. And in at least one county, formal ties to
lawyers who represent defendants were tried but failed. The New Orleans CIU was initiated in
late 2014, during the district attorney’s re-election campaign, as a one-of-kind partnership with
the Innocence Project New Orleans. The unit began operation in January 2015, worked on one
exoneration, and was disbanded one year later, in January 2016. 9

8

See Barry Scheck, Professional and Conviction Integrity Programs: Why We Need Them, Why They Will Work,
and Models for Creating Them, 31 Cardozo L. Rev. 2215 (2010);
9
John Simerman, Cannizzaro, Innocence Project call it quits on project to unearth false conviction, The New
Orleans Advocate, Jan. 9, 2015.
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IV. Comments
Every section of this Report points in the same direction:
There were more exonerations last year than ever before, nearly three a week.
Exonerations used to be big news; now they’re common.
Last year saw record numbers of exonerations of innocent defendants in
categories in which they used to be especially rare: Defendants who falsely
confessed; defendants who pled guilty; defendants who were convicted of low
level drug offenses. It seems that prosecutors and judges are increasingly willing
to reconsider the guilt of convicted defendants in circumstances in which not long
ago substantial claims of innocence were routinely ignored.
There are now two dozen Conviction Integrity Units across the country; seven
years ago there was one. Prosecutors—the most powerful players in the American
system of criminal justice—increasingly recognize the seriousness of the problem
and are moving proactively to discharge their duty to protect the innocent as well
as punish the guilty.
The underlying message may seem clear: We have turned the corner in dealing with wrongful
convictions. There’s a lot more to do, but it’s just a matter of time.
In fact, that is not our view.
There is a growing awareness that false convictions are a substantial, widespread and tragic
problem. The popularity of the recent Netflix documentary Making a Murderer reflects and
contributes to that process. Increasingly, Americans realize that we convict innocent people of
crimes on a regular basis.
How many? We don’t know. We have reliable statistical evidence that the rate of false
convictions among death sentences in the United States is about 4%, 10 but we don’t have
comparable information about non-capital convictions. The rates for other types of criminal
cases could be lower or higher. But even a false conviction rate of 1% translates into tens of
thousands of miscarriages of justice a year, and thousands more who were convicted in past
years but remain in prison.
The exonerations that we report point to a much larger number of false convictions that remain
hidden:
In 2014 and 2015 there were 16 exonerations of defendants who were convicted
of murder in Brooklyn from 1988 through 1994; other such cases are pending.
This concentration of bad murder convictions from the years of the crack
10

Samuel Gross, Barbara O’Brien, Chen Hu & Edward H. Kennedy, Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants
who are sentenced to death, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111 no. 20 pp. 7230–7235
(2014).
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epidemic cannot be unique to Brooklyn. We have no doubt that similar numbers
of cases would be found in other cities around the country if the prosecutors in
charge devoted as many resources to finding them as the Brooklyn District
Attorney’s Office.
In 2014 and 2015, 73 innocent defendants who pled guilty to low level drug
crimes in Harris County, Texas, were exonerated by lab drug tests—and more to
come. But how many innocent defendants have pled guilty in Harris County in
cases for which no lab tests are available? And how many thousands more in the
thousands of other counties across the country?
So far, the changes are modest. Some conviction integrity units have taken dramatic steps, but
only in a handful of counties and only for the most serious violent crimes and for some cases
with exculpatory lab tests.
As with climate change, the significance of the issue of false convictions is now widely
acknowledged, despite committed doubters. In other respects, we are far behind. We have no
measure of the magnitude of the problem, no general plan for how to address it, and certainly no
general commitment to do so.
We’ve made a start, but that’s all.

______________________________________________
The National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School,
provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—
cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges
based on new evidence of innocence.

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EXONERATIONS IN 2015

EXONERATIONS IN 2015

APPENDICES

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Appendix Table A: Conviction Integrity Units and CIU Exonerations, by County and Year
County

State Population*

Web Contact Info
20042002 2003
2007 2008
Address Web/Phone
2006

CA

1,862,041

None

P

Dallas

TX

2,368,139

Yes

W, P

1M, 2M, 2SA,
3CSA,
1M,
1CSA
3SA, 1K 2CSA
1R 3SA, 3R

Harris

TX

4,092,459

None

W, P

2SA

Manhattan

NY

1,585,873

Yes

W

NY

2,504,700

Yes

P

Suffolk

MA

722,023

None

P

Baltimore
City

MD

621,342

None

W, P

Cook

IL

5,194,675

None

P

San Diego

CA

3,211,252

None

-

1R

1SA

2012

Santa Clara

Brooklyn

1M

2009 2010 2011

2013 2014 2015 TOTAL**

1SA

2R, 1A
1A

4
1SA, 1R

25

1R, 31D 42D

76

1SA
1M

4
10M

6M,
1B,1G

20
0

3M
2M

3M,
1SA

4M

3
3M

1M

13
1

1M,
1SA

703,462

None

P

NY

234,878

None

P

0

NY

1,339,532

None

-

0

Cuyahoga
District of
Columbia
Multnomah

OH

1,280,122

Yes

W, P

0

DC

601,723

None

-

0

OR

756,530

None

-

0

Philadelphia

PA

1,526,006

None

P

0

Pima

AZ

1,003,235

Yes

W, P

0

Yolo

CA

204,593

Yes

W, P

Bexar

TX

1,714,773

Yes

W, P

Los Angeles
New
Orleans
Tarrant

CA

9,818,605

None

-

LA

343,829

N/A

N/A

TX

1,809,537

Yes

W, P

0

Travis

TX

1,024,266

None

-

0

Ventura

CA

839,620

Yes

W, P

Lake

IL

Oneida
Nassau

TOTAL

Population

45,363,215

______

* Population figures from 2010 United States Census.
** The pages at the links for Cook County and for the all CIU Exonerations include one additional exoneration that occurred in 2016.

2

0
1A

1
0

1M

1M

CIU Exonerations

1

1

151

Key
Format:
For each county, the
shaded years are those
without a CIU, and the
highlighted years are those
with CIU exonerations.

Exonerations by crime:
For each year in which a
county had one or more
CIU exonerations, we list
the number of CIU
exonerations for each type
of crime, coded as follows:
A – Assault
B – Burglary
CSA – Child Sex Abuse
D – Drug Possession
G – Gun Possession
K – Kidnapping
M - Murder
R – Robbery
SA – Sexual Assault (adult)
For example, “2SA “ means
that there were two CIU
sexual assault exonerations
in the county in that year.

“Contact Info” Column:
W – Contact information
found on office Web site
P – Contact information
provided by Phone

SEVEN ILLUSTRATIVE EXONERATIONS IN 2015

Floyd Bledsoe
State: Kansas
Crime: Murder, Child Sex Abuse & Kidnapping
Convicted: 2000
Exonerated: 2015
Key Factors: Prosecutorial and Police Misconduct,
False Accusation, Misleading Forensics

In 1999, 14-year-old Zetta Camille Arfmann disappeared from the trailer home in
Oskaloosa, Kansas where she lived with her older sister, nephews and brother-in-law Floyd
Bledsoe.
Family members began searching, but could not find her. That night, Floyd’s brother, Tom
Bledsoe, left two messages on his church pastor’s answering machine saying he knew
where the girl was and asking for forgiveness.

Tom turned himself into the police, handed over the murder weapon, led police to her body
and told them, “I did it. I killed her.” She had been shot four times, dragged to the burial site
and burned in a trash dump on the farm where Tom lived with his parents.
After he was jailed, Tom changed his story and said that Floyd actually killed Camille and
told Tom how to find the body. He said he had falsely confessed after Floyd threatened to
expose Tom’s bestiality and pornography use.
Police released Tom and charged Floyd with first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping
and aggravated indecent liberties with a child. At trial Tom told the jury that Floyd
confessed to him during a roadside conversation as they sat in separate cars. Floyd’s
defense attorney failed to confront Tom about his hearing problems that were so severe
that it was extremely unlikely he could have heard anything Floyd said under those
circumstances.

Tom and Floyd’s father testified and provided an alibi for Tom to rebut the defense’s
suggestion that Tom was the killer. The prosecution presented no forensic evidence linking
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Floyd to the crime, and falsely told the jury that tests on the rape kit found no male
biological material.

The defense called alibi witnesses who said Floyd was with them during the murder. The
defense also called the pastor’s wife and Floyd’s wife to testify that Floyd’s two-year-old
son, Cody, said Tom shot Camille. By eliciting that testimony, however, the defense opened
the door to a second statement Cody made later that “Daddy” killed Camille.
Floyd was convicted sentenced to life in prison plus 16 years.

In 2014, lawyers for Floyd Bledsoe obtained DNA testing on the vaginal swab, the sexual
assault kit, and the victim’s clothing. DNA on the vaginal swab excluded Floyd, but matched
Tom Bledsoe. Tom’s father’s DNA was on the victim’s socks, suggesting that he helped drag
the victim’s body to the burial site.
During the investigation, the lawyers discovered an order signed by the prosecutor, the
county sheriff and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation prior to the trial agreeing not to
conduct DNA testing on the evidence. After Floyd’s lawyers filed a motion to vacate Floyd’s
convictions, his brother Tom committed suicide and left several suicide notes admitting
that he raped and killed Camille.

In one of the notes, he asked his parents to “please tell Floyd I am sorry.” In another he said
that the prosecuting attorney ordered him to lie and implicate Floyd. In a third, he drew a
map showing where a shell casing could be found. Using a metal detector, detectives found
the shell casing.
In December 2015, a judge vacated Floyd’s convictions, the prosecution dismissed the
charges, and he was released.

Quentin Carter
State: Michigan
Crime: Rape
Convicted: 1992
Exonerated: 2015
Key Factors: Perjury, Teenage Defendant
In 1992, 16-year-old Quentin Carter was convicted of raping a 10-year-old girl and
sentenced to six to 20 years in prison in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the same time, Aurelias
Marshall, the boyfriend of the girl’s mother, was convicted of child abuse after he admitted
he beat the girl until she identified Carter as being one of three youths who raped her.
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Carter was repeatedly denied parole because he refused to admit that he had committed
the crime. Ultimately, he served nearly 17 years before he was released in 2008.

In 2014, the Kent County Prosecutor’s Office re-opened an investigation of the June 11,
1990 murder of Joel Battaglia in Grand Rapids. During the investigation—which focused on
Marshall—investigators questioned the victim in the rape case, who by then was in her
30’s. She told them that she had been raped by Marshall rather than Carter, and that
Marshall beat her until she agreed to falsely accuse Carter of committing the rape along
with two fictional accomplices.
The victim told police that she had also been sexually assaulted by her stepfather at age
seven (he was convicted and imprisoned) and by a relative at age 13 (the relative was
removed from her home).

She said that Marshall chose Carter because his name was found on a piece of paper in the
garbage outside a neighborhood home. She later said in an interview with the media that
she had spent much of her childhood locked in a room while her mother and various
boyfriends smoked crack. Once Marshall moved in, she frequently urinated in her room
even if the door was not locked, for fear of going out into the hallway if Marshall was in the
house.

She also said that on two occasions over the years after Carter’s conviction, she went to the
Prosecutor’s Office to try to tell them that she had lied, but no one believed her.

Investigators interviewed the victim’s mother, who admitted that she knew at the time that
Marshall was the real rapist and that he beat the victim to force her to identify someone
else.
After Marshall was convicted of the murder of Mr. Battaglia, the Kent County Prosecutor’s
Office disclosed that Carter was innocent and that Marshall was the rapist. On June 25,
2015, on a motion by the prosecutor, Carter’s conviction was vacated and the charge was
dismissed.

Zachary Handley
State: Pennsylvania
Crime: Arson
Convicted: 2008
Exonerated: 2015
Key Factors: False Confession, Perjury, Teenage
Defendant

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In December 2007, police in Stockertown, Pennsylvania, told 13-year-old Zachary Handley
that if he confessed to arson he would get counseling and would not to be locked up over
Christmas.
He did confess, but despite their promise, the police arrested him on December 21 anyway
and he spent Christmas in jail.
At an adjudicatory hearing without a jury in January 2008, Judge Anthony Beltrami found
Handley delinquent for setting two fires—one in a restaurant dumpster and another that
destroyed an apartment building. The sole witness against him was 25-year-old Karla
Dewey, who said she saw Handley set the fires.
After a psychological evaluation, Handley was ordered to spend six to 12 months in a
residential program for youths who intentionally set fires. At the time, Dewey submitted a
victim impact statement saying that it was the second devastating fire she had been
involved in—her family home had burned down in 2003. Judge Beltrami also ordered
Handley to pay $625,000 in restitution for the fire damage.
Handley, who repeatedly said his confession was false, was discharged in January 2009,
after a year in the program.

More than three years later, in September 2012, Karla Dewey was charged with arson for
setting two fires. She was accused of setting fire to her home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania—a
town just three miles from her former residence in Stockertown—and setting a fire at St.
John’s United Church of Christ Church in Nazareth. The police said that Dewey was also a
suspect in six other unsolved arsons in the Nazareth area.
In 2013, by coincidence, Dewey’s cases were assigned to the courtroom of Northhampton
County Common Pleas Judge Anthony Beltrami—the same judge who presided over
Handley’s juvenile arson case five years earlier.

Dewey pled guilty to arson and endangering the welfare of children for setting the fire at
her home. She admitted that she used a lighter to set fire to a couch and then left, taking her
three-year-old child with her, before they were harmed. After taking the plea, Judge
Beltrami recalled that Dewey was also the witness who had implicated Handley in two fires
in 2007.
Based on his “strong suspicion that it was not just a coincidence that three of Dewey’s
homes had been destroyed by fire and she just happened to be present at, and was an
eyewitness to, both fires that (Handley) was accused of setting,” Judge Beltrami vacated
Dewey’s guilty plea and recused himself from her case.
In August 2013, Dewey appeared before another judge, pled guilty again, and was
sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for arson and a consecutive six to 12 month
sentence for child endangerment.
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In May 2015, Judge Beltrami vacated the delinquency finding and the restitution order
against Handley and dismissed the case. The judge declared that “it has become abundantly
clear to this Court that fire is an instrument of power and a weapon of choice to which
Karla Dewey was no stranger. It has also become abundantly clear that it appears to be
more than a mere coincidence that the common denominator in all of these fires is Karla
Dewey.”

Lewis Fogel
State: Pennsylvania
Crime: Murder, Rape
Convicted: 1982
Exonerated: 2015
KeyFactors: Perjury
Lewis Fogle spent nearly 34 years in prison for a murder he confessed to, but did not
commit. He was exonerated by DNA testing in 2015 nearly 40 years after a man picking
blackberries discovered the partially-clad body of 15-year-old Deann Katherine Long in the
woods near her home in Indiana County, Pennsylvania.
Long was last seen on July 30, 1976—the day before her body was found. She had been
raped and shot once in the back of the head—not at close range, suggesting she may have
been trying to flee when killed.
Five years later, a man name Earl Elderkin—who had attempted to admit himself to a
psychiatric facility saying he was having recurring dreams about the murder—gave a
statement about the crime while under hypnosis by an amateur hypnotist. Elderkin
implicated Fogle, who was 28 years old, as well as Fogle’s brother Dennis and two other
men.

Elderkin said that Lewis Fogle raped the victim on the front seat of the car, after which his
brother raped her as well, and then Lewis Fogle shot Long in the back of the head.
The police picked up Dennis Fogle and questioned him, and eventually obtained a
confession that matched Elderkin’s statement almost exactly. As a result, Lewis Fogle was
arrested, as were his brother and the two other men. All four were charged with murder
and rape.

By the time Lewis Fogle went to trial in Indiana County Court of Common Pleas in February
1982, three men who were in the jail with Fogle had agreed to testify that Fogle confessed
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to the rape and murder. There was no forensic or physical evidence linking Fogle to the
crime.

The trial judge excluded Elderkin’s statement from evidence because the hypnotist who
obtained it was untrained, made no written record of information given to him by the
police prior to the session, made no record of what Elderkin remembered before he was
hypnotized, and failed to record the session itself.

Fogle denied any involvement in the crime and said he spent the day with his parents and
his brother, until 10 p.m. when they went to a bar. Fogle’s parents testified and supported
his alibi.
On February 26, 1982, the jury convicted Fogle of second-degree murder and rape. Fogle,
who was married three months before he was arrested, was sentenced to life in prison
without parole.
The prosecution later dismissed the charges against Dennis Fogle and the two others for
lack of evidence.

In 2015, an investigation instigated by the Innocence Project and the Pennsylvania
Innocence Project located physical evidence from the crime scene, including the victim’s
pubic hair combings. DNA tests on that evidence revealed the DNA profile of an unknown
male. Fogle’s DNA was not found.

In August 2015, Fogle’s conviction was vacated and he was released to the arms of his wife,
Deb, who had staunchly supported his innocence for more than 34 years. In September
2015, the charges against him were dismissed.

Bobby Johnson
State: Connecticut
Crime: Murder
Convicted: 1990
Exonerated: 2015
Key Factors: False Confession, Police Misconduct,
Inadequate Legal Defense, Teenage Defendant
On August 1, 2006, 70-year-old Herbert Fields was fatally shot as he sat in his car in New
Haven, Connecticut, in an apparent robbery. Four witnesses told police that two black
youths ran from the scene after the shooting. The witnesses said that prior to the shooting,
the two youths approached the car, one on each side. One leaned into the driver’s side and
shot Fields. Both youths took items from the car and fled.
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A month later, New Haven police detectives picked up 16-year-old Bobby Johnson, who had
an IQ of 69 and was barely able to read or write. After two interrogation sessions—during
which the detectives lied and said there was physical evidence linking Johnson to the crime,
and falsely told him he could get the death penalty but that they would get him probation
instead—Johnson confessed to the murder.
While that investigation was going on, the detectives were also investigating three other
murders in New Haven—two that occurred before the killing of Fields and one that
occurred afterwards.

On September 15, 2006—12 days after Johnson confessed and said the gun used to kill
Fields came from his cousin—ballistics tests on a gun linked to the other three murders
showed it was also the weapon used to kill Fields. The gun was found on the body of 16year-old Larry Mabery.

The detectives did not attempt to link the perpetrators of the other murders to the Fields
murder, despite the forensic evidence linking them to the crime. Instead, they brought
Johnson back in and forced him to change his statement to say he had borrowed the gun
from Mabery.

In July 2007, Johnson pled guilty to murder and was sentenced to 38 years in prison. His
appointed attorney conducted no investigation, even though he had received the forensic
reports linking the gun in the other murders to Fields’ murder.

By 2008, the lead detective in the Fields murder was facing larceny and forgery charges for
submitting false claims for funds to pay confidential informants and pocketing the money.
He was later acquitted and resigned from the department. The City of New Haven later
settled lawsuits brought by defendants who accused that detective of conducting coercive
interrogations and making false statements.
In 2015, attorneys for Johnson finally obtained the police records on the other murders
that were committed with the gun used to kill Fields. The records showed that those
murders were committed in the same manner as the murder of Mr. Fields—each victim
was shot while he sat in a car.
In September 2015, New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington filed a motion to
vacate Johnson’s conviction, the charge against Johnson was dismissed and he was
released.

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Debra Milke
State: Arizona
Crime: Murder, Kidnapping, Child Abuse, Conspiracy
Convicted: 1990
Exonerated: 2015
Key Factors: False “Confession,” Police &
Prosecutorial Misconduct, Child Victim, Death Penalty
In Phoenix, Arizona in 1989, James Styers asked his roommate, 25-year-old Debra Milke, to
borrow her car to run errands and take Milke’s 4-year-old son to a mall to see Santa Claus.
A few hours later, Styers telephoned Milke and said that he had lost Christopher and that
he and a friend, Roger Scott, were looking for him.
The next morning, when the boy had not been found, Phoenix police called in Detective
Armando Saldate, Jr., who had a reputation for getting confessions. Detective Saldate
interrogated Scott, who eventually led police into the desert where they found
Christopher’s body. The boy had been shot three times in the head. Detective Saldate
asserted that Scott implicated Styers and Milke in the crime, saying they killed the boy to
cash in on a $5,000 insurance policy on his life.
Saldate then interrogated Milke and claimed she had confessed—which Milke denied.
Saldate’s supervisor had ordered that the interrogation be tape recorded, but it was not.

Even though no physical or forensic evidence linked Milke to the crime, she was charged
with capital murder, conspiracy to commit murder, child abuse and kidnapping, as were
Styers and Scott. Styers told police that Milke was not involved in the murder and Scott
refused to testify against her, rejecting a prosecution offer to plead guilty to second-degree
murder in exchange for his testimony.
The primary evidence against Milke was the testimony of Detective Saldate, who testified
that during the interrogation Milke flashed her breasts, offered him sex, and admitted to
conspiring to kill the boy for insurance money. Milke told the jury that Saldate’s testimony
was false.

In 1990, Milke was convicted and sentenced to death. Styers and Scott admitted taking part
in the abduction and murder and both also were sentenced to death.
Milke spent the next 25 years appealing her case. After painstaking research, Milke’s
appellate attorneys eventually found that Detective Saldate had a history of fabricating
confessions. In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that the
prosecution committed "egregious misconduct" by failing to tell the defense about
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Detective Saldate’s history of obtaining false confessions, lying to his supervisors and other
improper conduct. The court ordered a new trial.
The Maricopa County District Attorney’s office said it would retry Milke. But in December
2014, the Arizona Court of Appeals found that the misconduct against Milke was so serious
that retrying her would violate the prohibition against double jeopardy. The prosecution
was ordered to dismiss the charges.
Milke was exonerated after 26 years in prison, 22 of them on death row.

Raymond Mora, Amaury Villalobos, and
William Vasquez
State: New York
Crime: Murder and Arson
Convicted: 1981
Exonerated: 2015
Key Factors: Invalid Forensic Evidence, Perjury,
Inadequate Defense, Conviction Integrity Unit
In 1980, a fire erupted in a three-story Brooklyn townhouse, killing 27-year-old Elizabeth
Kinsey and her five children.

At the time the building’s owner, Hannah Quick, was facing charges that she operated a
“shooting gallery” in her apartment where people came to get high on heroin. She said that
she had previously argued with one or two men over a bad batch of drugs.

Police charged three men with murder and arson: 25-year-old Raymond Mora, 30-year-old
Amaury Villalobos, and 34-year-old William Vasquez.

They went to trial in Kings County in 1981. Quick testified that following the argument, one
of the men threatened to burn the building down. She told a jury that she was awakened by
a noise, looked out her window and saw the three men leave just before an explosion
rocked the building.
The state fire marshal assigned to investigate the blaze concluded that the fire started at
two separate locations on the first floor indicating that the fires were set intentionally.

In addition, he said areas of low burning along the baseboards indicated the fires started
there. “Fire can’t travel downward. Fire travels up,” he testified. According to the fire
marshal, puddle shapes on the tiles—called pour patterns—and the fact that the
baseboards had burned down to the ground level indicated an accelerant was used.
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Defense lawyers failed to introduce evidence that laboratory tests found no traces of
accelerants in the debris.

Mora’s and Villalobos’s wives testified that they were with their husbands at the time the
fire broke out. All three were convicted by the jury. They were each sentenced to 25 years
to life in prison.

Their appeals were denied. Mora died in prison in 1989. Villalobos and Vasquez—who lost
his eyesight in prison because of untreated glaucoma—were released on parole in 2012.

That same year arson expert John Lentini examined the fire records and concluded that the
fire marshal’s determination that there were two separate fires was incorrect. That mistake
was based on what was known about fires in 1981.
In the spring of 2015, investigators for Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson’s
Conviction Review Unit located Quick’s daughter who said that before Quick died in 2014,
she admitted she had lied about seeing Mora, Vasquez and Villalobos and that she regretted
sending three innocent men to prison.
In December 2015, Villalobos and Vasquez were back in Kings County Supreme Court
where their convictions—and Mora’s—were vacated and the charges were dismissed.

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