Thanks to the work of a legal team led by MAIP Board Member Barry Pollack, a New York man who spent seventeen years behind bars for a murder he did not commit was exonerated last week.

Despite the lack of any forensic evidence, Fernando Bermudez was convicted of the 1991 shooting of then sixteen-year-old Raymond Blount outside a New York City nightclub.  Blount was shot on the street shortly after punching another teenager, Efraim Lopez, in the Marc Ballroom near Manhattan’s Union Square.  Lopez testified at trial as a cooperating witness, implicating Bermudez as the shooter.

In the years after Bermudez was convicted, all five eyewitnesses against him, Lopez and four eyewitnesses who had testified at trial identifying Bermudez as the shooter, recanted their testimony.  Three of those witnesses reiterated that their trial testimony was inaccurate in a hearing this September.  Other eyewitnesses at that hearing also testified that Bermudez was not the person who shot Mr. Blount.  At the hearing, significant evidence was also presented implicating another individual, a drug dealer who was a friend of Lopez, as the murderer.
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Edward Green became the first person in the District of Columbia to be exonerated by DNA evidence. On July 3, 1987, a woman was raped on a footbridge in Southeast DC. On August 5, 1987, a second victim managed to escape a similar rape attempt and alert the police. After being arrested near the scene of the crimes, Green was charged with rape and assault with intent to rape.

At trial, the prosecution’s case hinged upon the testimony of the two victims, both of whom positively identified Green in court. One of the victims also selected Greene out of a photo array and lineup, while the other identified him in a “show-up” conducted on the street. Green’s blood type also matched that of the assailant. After three hours of deliberation, a jury convicted Greene of rape, while acquitting him on charges of assault with intent to rape.

Even after his conviction, Edward Green steadfastly maintained his innocence. Prior to sentencing, the defense conducted DNA testing on fluids found on the victim’s clothes, comparing them with blood samples provided by Green and the victim. Despite several objections by the prosecution, the trial judge postponed sentencing proceedings, pending the results of the DNA testing.  In February of 1990, world renowned laboratory, Cellmark Diagnostics, issued a report excluding Edward Green as the source of the semen found on the victim’s clothes.

Based upon this conclusive evidence, the DC Superior Court granted a defense motion for a new trial on March 19, 1990. Subsequently, the US Attorney dropped all charges against him and Green soon became a free man.

Edward Green continues to use his experiences as a platform to speak out against the perils of wrongful conviction and was prominently featured in a 2006 Washington City News article about the promise of DNA testing and the challenges faced by those seeking to use it to establish innocence. To date, Edward Green has not been compensated for his nine months of imprisonment on the false rape charges, nor has the true rapist ever been found.

MAIP Client David Wayne Boyce is serving two life sentences for the 1990 murder of his roommate, Timothy Kurt Askew, 35, at the Econo Lodge motel in Newport News, Virginia.  Police and prosecutors claimed that Mr. Boyce, a young man with no criminal history, stabbed Mr. Askew repeatedly, killing him and then robbing him.  There was no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony that linked Mr. Boyce to this crime.  Mr. Boyce has maintained his innocence since his initial arrest.

Mr. Boyce was convicted largely based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant Herman Preston Elkins, a self-confessed mentally ill repeat offender.  In 2004, Mr. Elkins called Mr. Boyce’s counsel and recanted his trial testimony against Mr. Boyce.  He claimed he was coerced by the Newport News Police prior to Mr. Boyce’s trial.  Also in 2004, DNA evidence positively excluded Mr. Boyce from the physical evidence found at the crime scene.

MAIP attorneys and investigators have been working on Mr. Boyce’s case with lawyers from Howrey LLP and Hunton & Williams LLP since 2005, when they filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in response to Mr. Elkins’ unsolicited phone call.  The petition has not yet been decided but is expected to move forward with the recent appointment of a new judge – Norfolk Circuit Court Judge John R. Doyle III.

In addition to asserting his innocence, Mr. Boyce’s team contends that the police and prosecutors violated the Constitution by withholding potentially crucial evidence from his counsel prior to trial, including: 1) Mr. Elkins’ history of mental illness and long-standing relationship with the police department, 2) a memo showing that another person had confessed to the crime, 3) reports that exclude Mr. Boyce’s fingerprints from those found at the crime scene, and 4) a photograph of Mr. Boyce taken the day of the murder that contradicts an alleged identification of the murderer.

Mr. Boyce’s team believes that this withheld evidence would have changed the outcome of Mr. Boyce’s trial.  Mr. Boyce’s attorneys are hopeful that the judge will find that the prosecution had a duty to turn over this evidence prior to trial, grant the petition for habeas corpus and order a new trial for Mr. Boyce after 19 years in prison.          

Click here to read a story in the Newport News Daily Press about the Boyce case.   

Click here to learn more about how "snitch" testimony can lead to wrongful convictions.

After spending more than 11 harsh years in prison for a crime they did not commit, Joseph J. Dick, Jr., Derek E. Tice, and Danial J. Williams, became free men in early August thanks in large part to the legal work of two members of MAIP’s Board of Directors.

On August 6, 2009, Governor Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia granted conditional pardons to the Navy veterans known as the “Norfolk Four” but fell short of granting them absolute pardons based on innocence. Gov. Kaine denied the clemency request of Eric C. Wilson, the fourth member of the group, who was released in 2005 after serving 8 ½ years in prison.Just over a month later, Tice received even more complete relief when a federal judge granted his petition for habeas corpus, setting the stage for his conviction to be officially vacated."

While we are glad that Joe, Derek and Danial will finally be coming home to their families," said Tice’s attorney Desmond Hogan, "we are gravely disappointed that Governor Kaine has disregarded the overwhelming evidence of innocence, which proves only one man was responsible for this tragic crime."

Teams of lawyers at three national law firms have been representing Williams, Tice and Dick, who were serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole, on a pro bono basis for the past five years. The law firm teams were led by two MAIP Board Members, Donald Salzman of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Hogan of Hogan & Hartson, representing Williams and Tice, respectively and by George Kendall, who at the time was working at Holland & Knight on behalf of Dick.

On September 14, US District Judge Richard Williams vacated Tice’s conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. In his ruling, Judge Williams agreed with Tice’s attorneys that if Tice’s trial attorney had moved to suppress his confession, which the court found was obtained despite Tice’s invocation of his right to silence, “there is a reasonable probability that Tice would not have been convicted," and “the prosecution’s case against Tice [is] awash in doubt, Williams wrote. Under the term of the conditional pardon, the convictions still stand for Williams and Dick.

The four Navy men were wrongfully convicted based on false confessions extracted after they were subjected to high-pressure interrogation tactics, including threats of the death penalty and questionable use of lie detector tests.  The details in the men’s confessions did not match the crime scene, the other confessions, or the confession of the real killer.

All of the DNA and forensic evidence in the Norfolk Four case pointed to one man, Omar Ballard, and only his confession matched the physical evidence. Ballard is now serving a life sentence for the crime and has sworn under oath that he committed the crime by himself.

With Tice, Dick and Williams on their way home, their families took immediate steps to help them reintegrate into their communities. The men have been meeting with social workers and job counselors to help them make the adjustment, but they have a tough road ahead of them because convictions remain on their record for a crime they did not commit.

"Though we are overjoyed to finally have our sons back, we are saddened that Governor Kaine failed to recognize their actual innocence," said Larry Tice. "Our sons lost more than a decade of their lives. We must make sure that a tragedy like this one never strikes another family.”

Because false confessions are such a common cause of wrongful convictions, MAIP advocates for reforms that can reduce the risk of such confessions.  These reforms include legislation mandating the electronic recording of interrogations in their entirety and training for police officers on proper interrogation tactics.

“This case – and the frequency of false confessions in criminal cases – shows that common sense reforms like the videotaping of interrogations are needed to protect the innocent and our communities,” said MAIP Executive Director Shawn Armbrust. “We must work to ensure that no other innocent people suffer as the Norfolk Four did.”

Anthony Gray had spent seven years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit before finally being released in February 1999. 

In 1991, 38-year-old Linda Mae Pellicano was found stabbed and raped in her Chesapeake Beach, MD home.  Anthony Gray was arrested, and authorities told him that two other men who had been arrested had implicated him, in order to make him confess.  Gray, who has a below-average IQ, did confess, and eventually pleaded guilty to first degree murder and first degree rape, believing that it would allow him to avoid the death penalty.  He was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences, while the other two men were not found guilty.

Five years later, in 1997, police arrested a man named Anthony Fleming for breaking and entering.  Hoping for a plea deal in that case, Fleming talked to police about details of the Pellicano murder that were never publicized, which aroused suspicion that he had been involved. DNA testing of the semen from the crime scene confirmed a match with Fleming, who then pled guilty to the 1991 rape and murder.  He was sentenced to life in prison.

After Fleming was arrested, Calvert County State's Attorney Robert Riddle, who had long expressed doubts about Gray’s innocence, spent fifteen months making sure that Gray could not have been an accomplice. Anthony Gray remained in prison during this time until February 8, 1999, when he walked out of the Calvert County, Md. courthouse a free man.

Like most exonerees, Gray has sought out compensation from the government, but according to a Maryland statute, the Board of Public Works cannot award any money unless the wrongfully convicted person first receives a pardon from the governor.  Gray has not yet been pardoned, so he has yet to receive compensation for his eight years spent in prison.

On November 7, 2002, Bernard Webster became the first person to be exonerated under a new Maryland DNA law, after spending twenty years in prison for a break-in and rape he did not commit.

In July 1982, a 47-year-old schoolteacher came home to her Towson apartment in the middle of the afternoon.  She heard a rustling in her closet, and when she walked into her bedroom, a black man jumped out and attacked her.  The victim told the jury that the man put what he said was a gun to her back, covered her head with a bathrobe, forced her onto the bed, and raped her.

Bernard Webster, who was nineteen at the time, became a suspect because the Baltimore County police had arrested him months earlier for stealing a purse.  Other residents of the victim’s apartment complex then picked him out of a photo lineup as a man they’d seen around the complex that day.  The victim picked him out of a photo lineup as the man who attacked her.  Though the defense presented two witnesses who told the jury that they’d seen Webster playing basketball that day, miles away from the crime scene, and despite questionable forensics declaring that Webster’s blood matched the blood found on the bedspread (this contradicted an earlier report), Webster was found guilty in 1983 and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

From prison, Webster continued contacting the Maryland public defender office, but there was little the attorneys could do for him until the advent of DNA testing.  Finally, in 2000, the office took on his case to help him prove his innocence, and in 2001, Webster filed his own petition for DNA testing.  That year, a new law was enacted in Maryland, allowing judges to order DNA testing for people serving sentences for rape or murder when testing could prove their innocence.  Though the Baltimore County state’s attorney’s office asked the court to deny the motion, Judge Christian Kahl allowed the testing to go forward.

Testing was performed on three slides found at the hospital where the victim was treated twenty years prior.  The results excluded Webster as the contributor of the spermatozoa, and in November 2002, his sentence was vacated.  Bernard Webster was 40 years old when he left prison, becoming the 3rd person in Maryland and the 115th nationwide to have his conviction overturned by DNA evidence.

After exoneration, Webster was awarded $900,000 in compensation – $45,000 for each year he wrongfully spent in prison.

In 1987, Guy "Gordy" Marsh was released from prison after serving 14 years in prison for a murder he did not commit and was set up for by a detective.

On June 28th, 1971, Charles Erdman was murdered inside a Glen Burnie, Maryland 7-Eleven on Crain Highway after attempting to stop a robbery that was in progress by two masked men. The main witness against Marsh at trial was Linda Packech, a heroin addict with a lengthy criminal record. She claimed to have seen Marsh come out of the 7-Eleven and raise his mask. Her testimony was the primary evidence used to convict Marsh. He was sentenced to life-plus-ten years in prison.

In 1987 though, Packech admitted that she had lied during the trial. She eventually told both a reporter and the prosecutor that she had been pressured to identify Marsh by a Anne Arundel County police detective who was convinced he was guilty, but was unable to find any evidence implicating Marsh after an 18-month investigation. In actuality, Packech was in jail on shoplifting charges at the time of the crime and could not have been present at the murder scene. Marsh’s original conviction was overturned and prosecutor’s decided not to retry him, making him a free man. Packech was eventually convicted of perjury for her testimony during Marsh’s trial.  

In 2005, Marsh (along with several other exonerees) attended the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project’s National Innocence Network Conference, where experts and advocates convened to discuss recent developments in the fight to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

Because technically, prosecutors never acknowledged Marsh's absolute innocence, he has been unable to receive a full pardon and has thus been ineligible for compensation, despite the misconduct that went into his wrongful conviction. Marsh has spent much of the past twenty years as a truck driver in Maryland.

Thanks in large part to the work of the Innocence Project of Texas, a Dallas man was pardoned by Texas Gov. Rick Perry Wednesday, nearly thirty years after he was wrongfully accused of of raping and killing his girlfriend.

James Lee Woodard was originally released from prison in April 2008 after a DNA-retesting program run by the new Dallas District Attorney cleared him of the 1980 murder of  Beverly Ann Jones. He had spent 27 years behind bars for a crime he consistently denied doing. DNA testing was unavailable at the time of the crime. On Wednesday, the Governor officially cleared his name.

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On August 5th, 2008, Aaron Michael Howard was released from prison after serving almost twenty years for a crime he did not commit. In 1990, Howard and three co-defendants were sentenced to 21 years to life for the 1988 murder of Bobby Parker in Washington, D.C.Parker, 23, was stopped at a red light at Chesapeake Street and Southern Avenue in Southeast Washington when he was shot eight times. Howard was one of four young men from the surrounding neighborhood who were charged and eventually convicted of the crime.

While the government's evidence against two of Howard's three co-defendants was very strong, there was hardly any evidence connecting Howard to the murder. At trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Saffern called a total of 26 witnesses. But only two of those 26 placed Howard at the murder scene—Bobby Taylor, a man with a history of psychiatric problems, and his sister, Caroline Thompson. When asked by Saffern to identify Howard in the courtroom, Thompson pointed to one of Howard’s co-defendants, further undermining her and her brother’s already weak testimony.

At the time of the murder, Howard was at home his mother and other friends. While he gave his court-appointed lawyer Nathan Silver the names and addresses of his alibi witnesses, Silver failed to interview them and see if they could vouch for his whereabouts. Despite the weak evidence implicating him, Howard was convicted along with his other co-defendants.

In 2002, Howard filed a motion under the relatively new DC Innocence Protection Act, reopening his case for investigation. In 2006, D.C. Superior Court Judge James Boasberg assigned Howard’s case to D.C. criminal defense attorney Zack Rosenburg. After working on the case for a year, Rosenburg explained to Seth Rosenthal that while the case was promising, there was just too much evidence to explore. Since Rosenthal sat on the board of directors of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, he asked if Rosenthal could help out. After getting approval from his law firm, Venable LLP, Rosenthal agreed.

Howard’s legal team filed its amended motion to vacate Howard’s conviction on April 28th, 2008, which included multiple declarations they had obtained from various witnesses. With the help of private investigator Ronetta Johnson, Howard’s attorneys secured two declarations from eyewitnesses saying Howard was not at the crime scene and three declarations from witnesses who said they only saw three gunmen. Another declaration came from the mother of Caroline Thompson and Bobby Taylor, who said that her children were home with her at the time of the murder, making them unable to have seen anything, let alone Howard, at the crime scene.

The legal team interviewed Howard’s co-defendants multiple times and secured declarations from all three stating that Howard took no part in the murder. In addition to affirming that Howard was not involved in the crime, these statements established the involvement of a fourth individual other than Howard—an individual the government was aware of shortly after the murder but failed to investigate diligently. That fourth man, identified as the triggerman in Parker's shooting, had since passed away. The new statements were corroborated by a vast amount of other evidence, including forensic evidence and testimony introduced at trial, eyewitness accounts the government possessed but did not present at trial, and other documentary evidence that had emerged in the years since Howard’s conviction. The newly discovered evidence was so convincing that the lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney T. Anthony Quinn, withdrew from the case, stating that he could no longer defend the jury’s guilty verdict.

On July 29th, prosecutors offered Howard a deal. If he would agree to a voluntary manslaughter conviction, then his other convictions and sentences would be vacated. The agreement would impose a sentence of time served, no term of probation, no possible term of parole, and no government supervision. If accepted, Howard would be released from custody. Facing the prospect of a second wrongful conviction (and having already spent two decades in prison), Howard agreed to the deal on August 3rd, which was approved by Judge Boasberg.

On August 5th, 2008, Howard left prison. Although Howard was released, he unfortunately is not considered officially “exonerated.” "The agreement … is not perfect," Howard said in a written statement. "It is not perfect because, although it allows me to maintain my innocence, it requires me to accept a conviction for a crime I did not commit.”

Howard now lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife, Gabrielle. Because of his plea, he has received no compensation for his wrongful conviction.

Click here to watch Aaron Michael Howard speak at the 2009 MAIP Awards Luncheon

Victor "Bo" Burnette served 8 years in prison for a 1979 rape he did not commit.  A DNA test cleared Burnette, 56, of the crime, over two decades after having been paroled in Virginia.

A rape of a 19-year-old woman occurred in Richmond, Virginia in 1979: the woman woke up on the night on August 3rd to a man having intercourse with her.  She pushed him off of her, and when he moved towards the door, she testified that she “got a very good look at him.”  The next day, she spotted Victor Burnette on her street and believed he was the rapist.

It was this eyewitness identification, in conjunction with the testimony of state forensic serologist Mary Jane Burton, that convicted Burnette.  Burton testified that a hair found at the scene “was consistent” with Burnette’s – meaning that it was merely similar – and that spermatozoa was detected at the scene.  Forensic testing at the time was not sophisticated enough to verify whether or not the DNA found on the scene belonged to Burnette.  Burnette, despite having told the jury that he was home that evening caring for his ill grandmother, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the rape and burglary.

After being paroled in 1987, Burnette sought out DNA testing.  He was told that the forensic evidence from his case had been destroyed – “If you’re found guilty, your stuff is destroyed,” he recalls hearing.  As a convicted rapist, Burnette was unable to secure a job.  He taught himself carpentry, and started his own one-man home improvement company (that he still runs today), living a somewhat reclusive life.

Then one morning in December 2005, Burnette read an article in The Richmond Times-Dispatch, detailing how Julius Earl Ruffin and Arthur Whitfield were cleared of their convictions through DNA evidence.  Both of these cases involved Mary Jane Burton, the forensic scientist who testified against him: she had died in 1999, and left behind her files, where she had kept hundreds of small samples of evidence for her own records – there was no indicated reason why. Those cases were the catalysts for what is now the Virginia Old Case Testing Program.

Burnette, riding his bike over to the lab each day, pleaded with lab workers to again look for evidence in his now 26-year-old file.  The lab workers told him the test results had been forwarded to a Richmond prosecutor. He persuaded the prosecutor to give him the results over the phone: The evidence "eliminated" Burnette as a "contributor" to the DNA sample taken from the victim's rape kit.  "I knew what they had to be, but I just wanted to hear it from somebody. And she said, 'It wasn't you.' And it was great news."

Though the victim says she does not believe the results, two Virginia Department of Forensic Science reports from 2006 confirmed that Burnette was “eliminated as a contributor” of the evidence. 

After receiving the test results, Burnette applied for a pardon from Governor Tim Kaine.  The pardon application was finally granted on April 8, 2009. Burnette became the sixth person to be exonerated from the forensic evidence that Burton kept, and the first actual exoneration under the Old Case Testing Program.

To watch Victor speak about his case at the 2009 MAIP Awards Luncheon, click here