In Birmingham, Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton spent nearly thirty years on death row for two 1985 murders he did not commit, and walked free on April 3, 2015, after the only evidence against him — a claim that bullets from the crimes matched his mother’s revolver — was shown by modern examiners to be worthless. He was the 152nd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973. No physical evidence, no eyewitness to the killings, and no fingerprint ever placed him at either scene; the case rested entirely on a contested ballistics match produced by the state and never meaningfully challenged at trial, because his court-appointed lawyer believed he had too little money to hire a competent firearms expert and retained one who was legally blind in one eye and could not properly operate the comparison microscope.
The outcome is settled. On February 24, 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States, ruling unanimously in Hinton v. Alabama, found that Hinton’s trial counsel had been constitutionally ineffective for failing to seek funds for a qualified expert, and sent the case back. New examination by three independent firearms analysts — and then by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences itself — could not connect the bullets to the weapon. With its single thread of evidence gone, the state dismissed all charges, and Hinton was released from the Jefferson County jail.
He had been arrested in 1985 and sentenced to death in 1986. He was twenty-nine when he was condemned and fifty-eight when he was freed. The Equal Justice Initiative and its founder, Bryan Stevenson, represented him for roughly sixteen of those years, fighting through a state appellate system that repeatedly declined to revisit the discredited ballistics until the nation’s highest court compelled it.
This dossier centers Hinton as the wronged party. The system failures — a defense crippled by underfunding, a prosecution built on a single forensic assertion, and appellate courts unwilling to reopen a capital case — are the mechanism of the wrong. The murders of John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason remain, on this record, crimes for which the State of Alabama convicted the wrong man.
Glenn Ford spent nearly 30 years on Louisiana’s death row for a 1983 murder he did not commit, was released in March 2014 after the state conceded the case against him had collapsed, and died of cancer roughly fifteen months later — the longest-serving death-row prisoner in the United States to be fully exonerated before his death. Ford, a Black man, had been convicted in 1984 by an all-white jury in Shreveport for the killing of Isadore Rozeman, a 58-year-old jeweler and watch repairman for whom Ford did occasional yard work. The case has become a study in how a stacked jury, a defense unequipped to mount one, and suppressed evidence pointing to other men can combine to send an innocent person to death row for three decades.
The outcome is documented and final. Isadore Rozeman was found shot in the back of the head in his Shreveport shop on November 5, 1983. Ford, known to be near the store and identified by witnesses, was charged with first-degree murder; his court-appointed lawyers had no experience trying a jury case, one of them an oil-and-gas attorney. He was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to death. In 2013, an informant told prosecutors that another man, Jake Robinson, had admitted to the killing — information consistent with evidence the state had never disclosed to Ford’s defense.
On the strength of that disclosure, Ford’s legal team moved to vacate, and in March 2014 a Caddo Parish judge overturned the conviction. Ford walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on March 11, 2014, after nearly three decades inside. He was soon diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Louisiana then denied him the compensation owed to the wrongfully convicted, a judge reasoning that he was not “factually innocent” because he had allegedly known of or profited from the crime — a denial that drew a remarkable public apology from the prosecutor who had convicted him.
This dossier centers Glenn Ford as the wronged party. The system failures — a racially exclusionary jury, a defense without the means or experience to test the state’s case, and the concealment of evidence implicating others — are the mechanism. Jake Robinson is named only as the man the later record implicated, consistent with the prosecution’s own basis for vacating the conviction.
In West Memphis, Arkansas, three teenagers — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. — were convicted in 1994 of murdering three eight-year-old boys, and were released in August 2011 after eighteen years in prison through an unusual legal compromise that freed them without clearing their names. The case rested on a confession extracted from Misskelley, who has an intellectual disability, over roughly twelve hours of unrecorded interrogation, and on a prosecution theory that the killings were a satanic ritual. No physical evidence ever connected the three to the crime, and DNA testing later excluded all of them.
The outcome carries a precise and important distinction. The three were not exonerated. On August 19, 2011, they entered Alford pleas — a maneuver that let them assert their innocence while formally pleading guilty, acknowledging the state had evidence that could convict them at a retrial. Judge David Laser sentenced them to time served, roughly eighteen years and seventy-eight days, with ten-year suspended sentences. The convictions remain on the record. The men walked free, but in the eyes of the law they are still guilty.
That compromise was the product of leverage on both sides. By 2011 new DNA results and an allegation of juror misconduct had pushed the Arkansas Supreme Court to order an evidentiary hearing for Echols, who was on death row, raising the real prospect of costly retrials the state preferred to avoid. The Alford plea let prosecutors keep their convictions while conceding the defendants’ freedom, and it required the three to forgo civil claims against the state for wrongful imprisonment.
This dossier centers Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley as the people the system failed. The mechanisms of that failure — a coerced and inconsistent confession from a vulnerable teenager, a moral panic about Satanism that substituted for evidence, and forensic testimony built on an unaccredited credential — are the subject. No alternative perpetrator has been convicted; a hair “not inconsistent with” the stepfather of one victim was found in the bindings, but the record establishes no one else’s guilt, and this account asserts none.
In Chicago in August 1982, Anthony Porter was convicted of the double murder of Marilyn Green and Jerry Hillard, shot to death in Washington Park on the city’s South Side, and was sentenced to death; he was exonerated in 1999 after a Northwestern University investigation and the recantation of the sole eyewitness against him established that the case could not stand. Porter, who is Black and who tested with an IQ of 51, spent roughly sixteen years on Illinois’s death row for a crime the state ultimately conceded it could not prove he committed.
The outcome is settled, and so is the detail that defines the case: Porter came within roughly two days — about fifty hours — of being executed. In September 1998 the Illinois Supreme Court stayed his execution, not on the question of his guilt but on whether his cognitive disability left him competent to be put to death. That stay bought time. During it, journalism professor David Protess, his Northwestern students, and private investigator Paul Ciolino reinvestigated the case, found that the prosecution’s only eyewitness could not have seen what he claimed, and obtained that witness’s recantation. On February 5, 1999, Porter walked out of Cook County Jail; the charges were formally dismissed the following month.
No physical evidence had ever tied Porter to the killings. The conviction rested on the testimony of William Taylor, who told police he saw Porter shoot the victims — an account Taylor later swore had been pressured out of him, and that the investigation showed was physically impossible. The case is now studied as the clearest illustration of how thin a capital conviction can be.
This dossier centers Anthony Porter as the wronged party. The mechanism of the wrong was a coerced eyewitness, a near-total absence of physical proof, and a capital process that came within hours of making the error permanent. The case’s later complications — including a separate man’s confession that was itself contested and eventually set aside in 2014 — are recorded soberly below; none of them restored Porter’s conviction, which the courts had erased.