tagged w/ Wrongful Conviction
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Steve Drizin tells the story of Johnnie Lee Savory, a man who spent 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Mr. Drizin is the director of Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Conviction and helped win Johnnie's parole. This video was filmed at a Rainbow Push Coalition Saturday Morning Forum.Steve Drizin tells the story of Johnnie Lee Savory, a man who spent 30 years in prison... more
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savory
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3 years ago
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Since 1991, 218 people have been exonerated through DNA testing, and in more than three-quarters of the cases, mistaken eyewitness identifications were crucial in the wrongful convictions.
In the midst of being raped, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino told herself to pay attention to details that would allow her to identify her attacker.
She was able to give police in North Carolina a description that led to a sketch of the suspect. Then she identified a man from photographs, picked him out of a lineup and told jurors she was certain he was the rapist.
That man, Ronald Cotton, received a life sentence and spent more than 10 years in prison before DNA testing cleared him of the crime.
Now victim and the innocent man she helped convict are writing a book together.
Thompson-Cannino, who is white, had mistakenly picked out one black man; another was guilty of the crime.
"Between the composite sketch and the photo identification, I had messed it up," she said, recalling the 1984 rape and its aftermath. "By the time I got to the physical lineup, Ron Cotton had become my attacker and that was that."
And as she came to learn, she was not the only one to make a mistake so devastating that it deprived someone else of his freedom.
Since 1991, 218 people have been exonerated through DNA testing, and in more than... more
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