Innocence Cases

“The Mumia Exception”

May 1, 2009

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Not even the U.S. Supreme Court is immune from “the Mumia Exception.” On April 6, 2009 the high court denied Abu-Jamal’s request for a Writ of Certiorari, scuttling his last chance for justice.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

The Shame of Lorain, Ohio

December 6, 2002 Updated: June 7, 2013

Nancy Smith, center, with her four teenage children.

The ritual abuse hysteria that swept across the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in hundreds of innocent people being wrongfully convicted of committing a bizarre concoction of sexual acts on preschoolers. Most of those convicted were eventually freed from prison on appeal, but some innocent people remain behind bars. One of the most blatant cases of wrongful conviction occurred in Lorain, Ohio. There a politically ambitious prosecutor's office coaxed and manipulated a few Head Start preschoolers into testifying that they had been sexually abused repeatedly over a six-month period by their bus driver and some stranger -- two people who never even knew each other, but were sentenced to life for crimes that never occurred in the first place.

by Lona Manning

Bulletin: For Nancy Smith, her long legal odyssey ended June 4, 2013 in an Elyria courtroom where a judge released her for time already served. Instead of the vindication she had steadfastly fought for since her 1994 conviction on child molestation charges, she surrendered her rights to any further appeals to clear her name of the wrongful conviction she was subjected to at the hands of misguided and overzealous Lorain, Ohio prosecutors.

To avoid the possibility of being sent back to prison, she accepted a deal worked out between her attorneys and Lorain prosecutors that sentenced her to 12 years in prison but gave her credit for the 15 years already served since she and co-defendant Joseph Allen were convicted in the Head Start molestation case.

Judge Virgil Sinclair, a retired Stark Count judge appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court to handle Smith’s resentencing, also reduced the rape charges against her to the lesser offense of “gross imposition.”

The resentencing of Allen will take place at a later date. Like Smith, Allen has been free since mid-2009 when Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge acquitted both Smith and Allen when they appeared before him to correct a minor entencing error.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's Last Chance for Justice

The Framing of Mumis Abu-Jamal

April 4, 2009 by J. Patrick O'Connor

Speaking Truth to Power

April 5, 2009

Bookcover: Jailhouse Lawyers by Mumia Abu Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal's 27 years on Death Row for a murder he did not commit would have turned almost anyone else into an embittered, defeated man. Instead, he has remained what he always was, "the voice of the voiceless," as he demonstrates yet again in his most recent book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights Books, 2009.)

by J. Patrick O'Connor

Through hundreds of essays, radio commentaries and now six well-written, meticulously researched books, he has defied the walls that encase him to speak out against oppression. His voice his heard weekly throughout the United States on Pacifica Radio and his writings are read and admired throughout much of the world. From the bowels of Death Row, where 3,600 others languish in the United States, Abu-Jamal presses on for justice, day after day, year after year.

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. opens a tightly shut door into the operations of the U.S. penal system by chronicling the exploits of dozens of jailhouse lawyers – both men and women – who have fought the injustices the courts and the prisons have dealt them and their fellow prisoners. Their accomplishments, against all odds, have been incredible. Their story is a story never before told.

For the vast majority of the 2.3 million prisoners in the United States and for Abu-Jamal himself, the overriding, inescapable reality about the U.S. justice system is that the law is only what a judge says it is.