Innocence Cases

April 4, 2009

Mumia Abu-Jamal

by J. Patrick O'Connor

Since his conviction in 1982 for the murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, through his numerous books, essays and radio commentaries, has become the face of the anti-death penalty movement in the United States and an international cause célèbre. Paris, for example, made him an honorary citizen in 2003, bestowing the honor for the first time since Pablo Picasso received it in 1971.

Abu-Jamal's case has been politically charged from the beginning. As Amnesty International established in its 2000 pamphlet entitled "The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance," his tortuous appeal process has been fraught with "judicial machinations." Claims that won the day in other cases were repeatedly denied him, first by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1989 and subsequently by a Federal District Court in 2001 where the judge overturned his death sentence but left in place in his conviction – and Abu-Jamal on death row – pending further appeals.

The latest example of what has become known as "the Mumia exception" occurred in March of 2008 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in a sharply divided 2-1 decision, turned down Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new trial based on the claim that the prosecutor – through his use of peremptory challenges – purged otherwise qualified blacks from his jury. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Batson decision, ruling that racial discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional and merits the harmed defendant a new trial.

March 29, 2009

Wrongly accused? Omar Raddad stands outside the courthouse.

French justice can be quite curious. After being pardoned but not exonerated in the murder of his employer, Omar Raddad risked being re-imprisoned by asking for a new trial to clear his name.

by Anthony Davis

Wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal, 65, lived alone in a luxury villa in the affluent village of Mougins, near Cannes on the French Riviera. On the morning of Sunday, June 23, 1991, she was relaxing beside her pool doing a crossword puzzle, her favourite pastime, when her friends and neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Koster called over the fence to invite her to lunch. She readily accepted.

At 1:30 p.m. Mrs. Koster, anxious that her friend had not yet arrived for the meal, telephoned but there was no reply. She was puzzled, but presumed that something had happened to prevent her from showing up.

Something had happened. The following day, June 24, Mrs. Marchal was found stabbed to death in the basement of her house. Written in blood on the inside of the door was the incriminating message Omar m'a tuer (Omar killed me).

Police immediately arrested Omar Raddad, 28, a gardener who worked part-time for Mrs. Marchal. Although he consistently denied killing his employer, he was charged and three years later, February 2, 1994, found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment.

A fairly straightforward case you might think. So did the police.

Updated January 14, 2007

Kelly Michaels

The Wee Care case that sentenced Kelly Michaels to prison for 47 years was typical of the child-abuse hysteria that gripped the United States in the 1980s. At the peak of the frenzy of the great day-care witch hunt, it was the day-care workers, not the preschoolers, who were at risk. As the preschoolers, urged on by overzealous social workers, child therapists and prosecutors, told their incredible stories of sexual abuse and satanic rituals in courtrooms across the United States, scores of innocent people were sent off to prison. Some are still there.

by Lona Manning

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"

Kelly Michaels never intended to become a preschool teacher -- she had taken fine arts and drama in college -- but she wanted to live near New York City and was looking for something to pay the rent when she applied at Wee Care Day Care in Maplewood, N.J. Although Kelly doubted if she had the qualifications, the director, Arlene Spector, had been encouraging and had persuaded her to give it a try. Once hired, Kelly was quickly promoted from teacher's aide to preschool teacher.

Kelly, then 23 years old, found that the children responded well to her. She was the oldest child in a large family and she'd done a lot of babysitting. Even without special training, Kelly knew what little children liked, what songs and games made them laugh, how to soothe their upsets, and settle their quarrels. But Kelly grew dissatisfied with Wee Care and complained that the teachers were expected to do too much without enough support and supervision. She decided to look for another job.

Although she knew that it was upsetting for little children when their teachers -- with whom they'd formed a bond -- came and went, Kelly accepted a teacher's job at the Community Day Nursery in East Orange, N.J., where she shared an apartment with a roommate. Community Day Nursery was a nicer facility -- larger, lighter, airier -- than Wee Care where the kids were stuck in the basement of a stone church and had to traipse down a long hall and up a flight of stairs to go to the restrooms.

On May 6, 1985, as Kelly was getting ready for work, she must have felt that her life was beginning to take shape and direction. She had fallen into the other day-care job, but this one she had chosen.

Then came the knock on the door of her apartment. It was just after 7 a.m.

A police sergeant and an investigator, both men, stood in the doorway. They were looking for Margaret Kelly Michaels. Could she come down to the prosecutor's office for questioning? Bewildered and concerned, Kelly went to the prosecutor's office where she was told she was suspected of sexually touching three of the little boys at the Wee Care Day Care. Kelly was shocked and horrified and as the questioning continued, she began to cry:

March 14, 2005

Leo Frank (photograph c. 1915)

Virulent anti-Semitism led directly to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and lynching of the innocent, but Jewish, Leo Frank. Police and prosecutors fabricated evidence to win a death by hanging verdict. When the governor of Georgia commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, a resurgent Klan mob stormed the prison and re-imposed the original sentence.

by Denise Noe

At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered body in the factory's basement. Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried blood, her eyes were bruised, her face scratched and bruised and some of her fingers out of joint. A piece of rope, along with a strip taken from her own underpants, encircled her neck.

She was soon identified as 13-year-old Mary Phagan, the child of a working-class family. She had been employed at the factory putting metal tips on pencils. She had recently been laid off because the factory had run out of the metal required for her job. On Saturday, April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, she planned to see the parade but first wanted to stop off at the factory to collect $1.20 in wages owed her.

The killing captured the Monday headlines and news about it would appear on the front pages of Atlanta newspapers for more than a year afterward. Much of Atlanta suffered a paroxysm of grief over this murder. About 10,000 people showed up at the morgue and over 1,000 attended her funeral. Those grieving over this stranger were nicknamed ''Mary's People'' while she became known as ''the little factory girl.''

Updated Oct. 16, 2006

Mary and Robert Halsey

The courtroom testimony of twin 8-year-old boys – a concoction of fantasy and fear – led to a life sentence for Robert Halsey in 1993. In 2004 the National Center for Reason and Justice took up his case, but all of its appeals have been denied and the Massachusetts Supreme Court has denied Halsey's Application for Further Appellate Review. Now in his 70s and in failing health, the former bus driver will most likely die in prison, a victim of the child sexual-abuse hysteria that put him there.

by Lona Manning

Robert Halsey is in prison in Massachusetts. He's in his 70s, in poor health and he's been behind bars since 1993. Officially, he was convicted of sexual assault on children, but in another sense, he was convicted of being the bogeyman. His trial transcript makes for chilling reading -- and not for the reason you might expect. It raises the frightening possibility that an innocent person was accused and convicted of a childish concoction of fantasy and fear.

Halsey lived with his wife Mary in a modest house in the town of Lanesboro, in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He was an uncomplicated man. When he was younger and in better shape he enjoyed hunting and fishing. But as he entered his 60s, he was more likely to settle down in front of the television after a day of driving the school bus. His wife was more likely to be bustling around in the evening as Halsey, like many men of his generation, neither cooked nor cleaned. Mary Halsey relates how one evening, when she was working late in her craft room, her husband brought her a bowl of fruit cocktail. She was amazed that her husband had managed to find the can opener -- and that it had even occurred to him to be so thoughtful. It wasn't that he was a selfish man, but he was a man of limited imagination.

The Halseys had a grown daughter, but no grandchildren. "Children were very precious beings to both of us," says Mrs. Halsey. Her husband talked about the kids on his bus route "all the time," she recalled. "He enjoyed the kids, we always talked about them -- the things they said, if they did something funny."

In the fall of 1990, Beverly Walker arranged for bus service for her twin sons, who were entering a half-day kindergarten program at the local elementary school. The family lived on a winding, steep, dirt road, where no regular school bus could go, so the bus company (after some reluctance), bought a four-wheel-drive passenger van. Robert Halsey was the children's bus driver. Although Halsey picked up other children who lived on the outskirts of town, for a portion of his route, the twins were his only passengers.

He grew particularly fond of them. When the gas station was giving away Matchbox cars with every fill up, Halsey saved them to give to the boys, Jason and Justin Walker (all children's names and other identifying details concerning them have been changed). The Walker twins are teenagers now, but when they were 8 years old, they played a key role in sending Robert Halsey to prison, where he will most probably die.

How did Robert Halsey become the bogeyman of Lanesboro?