Wrongly imprisoned, a man’s lawsuit exposes failures in one state’s prosecutions
Posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2018 at 11:38 am
Why do we think it’s so important to aggressively defend your rights? Because of cases like this. A suspect in a 1992 kidnapping, rape and robbery fit the description and was found with the stolen jewelry. New Orleans police instead arrested someone else — and he spent more than 23 years in prison.
In at least 45 prosecutions dating to the 1970s, the lawsuit says, the district attorney’s office possessed evidence that could have helped the accused, but failed to disclose it. In nine of those cases, appeals courts overturned convictions after the evidence was uncovered.