One month ago, the Texas Monthly ran a story about Anthony Graves, a man from East Texas who has spent 18 years incarcerated for six murders committed in Somerville in 1992. The story, written by Pamela Coloff, detailed the unsubstantiated case against Graves which relied heavily on the testimony of Robert  Carter, a  primary suspect in the initial investigation who has since recanted his story. But yesterday, just weeks after Coloff’s article began to gather national attention, Graves was released from custody and all charges against him were dropped. Since his conviction in 1994, Graves spent 12  years on death…

After being exonerated in 2009 for a rape he was wrongfully convicted of in 1987, Victor Burnette is refusing to accept his $226,000 compensation from Virginia. He believes the conditions behind the money insinuate that he is a criminal rather than the innocent man that he is. Read the AP story here.

Days after the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments for Texas death row prisoner Henry “Hank” Skinner v. Gray County DA Lynn Switzer, the New York Times published the following editorial regarding DNA testing and its role in wrongful conviction and the death penalty. Read the editorial here. For more reactions regarding Wednesday’s oral arguments, see Alex Johnson’s full review.

Almost 30 years after Calvin Wayne Cunningham was convicted of rape, DNA testing has proven that he could not have committed the crime and is innocent, just as he has always claimed. Cunningham’s DNA sample neither matches the sperm nor the non-sperm secretions found on both the victim’s nightgown and vaginal swabs, providing conclusive evidence that Cunningham is not responsible for the rape in Newport News, Virginia, that left him incarcerated for more than seven years. Further testing excluded the victim’s husband as the source of the semen, making it apparent that an unknown third party committed the rape. Cunningham’s…

October 15, 2010 Six years after Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for setting a fire to his home that killed his three daughters, the case is again being heard in Texas court. The state has reopened the case to determine whether the 1991 arson investigation–on which Willingham was sentenced–was flawed, which could mean the late Willingham was wrongfully convicted and executed. Read Leslie Eaton’s story on the Wall Street Journal for details.

By Rachel Cicurel Every year in Hollywood, filmmakers romanticize real life. Even movies supposedly based on true stories tend to feature characters who are smarter, wittier and more attractive than any real people ever are, not to mention the coincidences and other turns of events than seem unlikely to have ever really happened. But for Betty Anne Waters and others across the nation, Fox Searchlight’s biopic Conviction isn’t an escape from reality. Rather, it’s a brutal re-imagining of their everyday lives. Conviction tells the true story of Betty Anne Waters, a woman from the small town of Ayer, Massachusetts, whose…

September 15, 2008 The Baltimore Sun ran a lengthy piece earlier this month on the recent efforts in Maryland’s state legislature to repeal the death penalty. On September 5, the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment convened its final public hearing. The Commission, created by Governor O’Malley, is charged with determining whether the state’s moratorium on the death penalty should be lifted or made permanent. Kirk Bloodsworth, a former death row inmate and a member of the Commission, was among those who testified. Bloodsworth was sentenced to death and served 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. …

By Alex Johnson, Staff Reporter for the Medill Innocence Project (as seen on www.medillinnocenceproject.org) In 2000, Medill senior Emily Probst asked a crucial question through a thick glass partition, setting off a decade-long chain of events that led all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Would Hank Skinner, a Texan convicted of a triple homicide in 1995 and sentenced to death, be willing to test the remaining physical evidence in his case, regardless of the outcome? “Yes,” he emphatically answered. “I think we knew then that we had our work cut out for us,” Probst, now a CNN producer,…

Sigmund Libowitz on wrongful conviction and representing MAIP exoneree Edward Bell It’s not as if he was naïve going into it. He knew the criminal justice system had its flaws. He knew that people slipped through the cracks. And subsequently, he knew that innocent men and women were behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. …He’d just never met them. For Sig Libovitz, a white collar defense attorney as Venable LLP in Washington, D.C., working on Edward Bell’s case of wrongful conviction changed a concept he understood into a tangible issue. And after working on just one wrongful conviction case…