• Who spent 25 years for a murder in New York, even though he was in Florida?
Who was wrongfully executed for a crime committed by a man with the same first name?
Here are 15 times people were wrongly accused – and convicted –
of murder.
15 –Kenny Waters • Kenny Waters was convicted of murder in
1983 and lost an appeal in 1985.
• That’s when his sister, Betty Anne Waters, got to work proving his innocence.
Betty Ann was a waitress and a high-school dropout when she started her work.
• 18 years later, she had a law degree and had successfully overturned her brother’s
conviction.
• And after all that, Betty Ann went back to her job as a waitress.
14 –Steven Truscott • Steven Truscott spent 10 years in prison
for the 1959 murder of Lynne Harper.
• He was sentenced to the death penalty for the crime when he was only 14 years old.
It wasn’t until a decade later that he was not only paroled, but acquitted of the crime.
• To this day, the crime has yet to be solved, but it is still undergoing cold case investigation.
The case could some day be solved with DNA evidence.
13 –West Memphis Three • The West Memphis Three were a group of
teenagers who were tried and convicted of the brutal murder of a trio of second-graders.
• The kids were hogtied, sexually mutilated, and beaten to death.
But the evidence used to convict the teens for the crime was circumstantial, and no hard
evidence linked them to the scene.
• In fact, some of the evidence at the scene linked to the stepfather of one of the kids.
• The three were convicted and put in prison for 18 years.
• They were released on an unusual plea deal that allowed them to plead innocent,
but remain guilty in court files.
So it’s actually hard to say whether they were wrongfully accused or not.
12 –Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee • Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee were held
in Florida prison for 12 years for a murder committed in 1963.
• Because it was the American South in 1963, the two black men were beaten by police until
they gave a confession, and their lawyer coerced them into pleading guilty.
• But not only did they NOT do it, but the person who DID confessed to the murder.
• Pitts and Lee were re-convicted and held on Death Row for another 9 years AFTER the
othe other man confessed to the crime.
11 –Darryl Hunt • Darryl Hunt was convicted of murder in
1984, and exonerated of that murder in 2004.
• After he was set free, he immediately went to work as an advocate for the wrongly-accused
and convicted.
• Hunt’s story doesn’t have a happy ending, though.
In 2016, Hunt was found in a locked pick-up truck, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.
10 –Michael Ray Hanline • Michael Ray Hanlinewas convicted in 1980
for the murder of a man who was after the same woman as him.
• And it took 36 years for them to realize the evidence at the scene didn’t match up
with him.
• Hanline is now the longest-serving wrongfully-convicted man in the history of the state of California.
9 –Rubin Carter • Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was a famed
boxer who was convicted twice for shooting two men and a woman at a New Jersey bar in
1966.
• He served 19 years in prison for the crime before being released.
In both of his convictions, there were legally-questionable tactics used by the prosecution, including
suppressed evidence and altered testimony.
• Carter became a civil rights icon as efforts grew to overturn his conviction.
Bob Dylan wrote the song “Hurricane” about him in 1976, and Denzel Washington portrayed
him in the movie “The Hurricane” in 1999.
8 –David McCallum • David McCallum was convicted of kidnapping
and murder at age 16.
That conviction was finally overturned with DNA evidence when he was 45.
• The previously mentioned Rubin Carter was one of those advocating for McCallum’s
release.
• Willie Stuckey, McCallum’s friend, was convicted too.
And his conviction was also overturned.
But Stuckey died in prison 13 years earlier.
7 –Juan Johnson • Juan Johnson spent 11 years in prison
wrongly convicted of murder.
When he got out, the City of Chicago was ordered to pay him 21 million dollars in compensatory
damages.
• Some of that money was supposed to come from the police officer that framed him by
coercing witnesses.
• Johnson said he didn’t want any money from the officer – he just wanted an apology.
• But the officer refused to offer an apology, so instead he had to pay Johnson 15 thousand
dollars out of his own pocket.
6 –Gary Gauger • In 1993, Gary Gauger was convicted of
murdering his own parents.
• During an all-night interrogation, detectives asked him to speculate on how he might have
hypothetically killed them, had he done it.
• Gauger complied, and the police took it as a confession, even though Gauger denied
it.
• His conviction was overturned in 1996, and in 1999, a member of a local biker gang
admitted to killing Gauger’s parents for 15 dollars, then laughing about the fact that
their son had been convicted for it.
5 –Davontae Stanford • When Davonte Stanford was 14, he was found
in his pajamas near a crime scene where four murders had taken place.
• Police put the 14-year-old through two straight days of interrogation, without allowing
a parent or a lawyer to sit in with him.
• After two days of coercion, Stanford confessed to the crime and plead guilty at trial.
• After the trial, a professional hit man who was already in prison for eight other
murders, admitted to killing those four people.
• Despite the twist, a judge decided to instead believe the confession of a confused,
developmentally disabled 14-year-old boy, and kept him in prison for 9 years.
4 –Cameron Todd Willingham • In 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham’s three
young daughters were killed in a fire.
• Willingham was charged with setting the fire on purpose, but evidence has come out
since that makes that seem almost impossible.
• For starters, a key witness for the prosecution apparently offered his testimony in exchange
for a reduction of his own, unrelated, criminal sentence.
• None of this helps Willingham, though.
Texas executed him in 2004.
3 –Carlos DeLuna • In 1983, Carlos DeLuna told the court
they had the wrong Carlos.
He knew who had committed the murder he was being accused of: Carlos Hernandez, a man
DeLuna knew personally.
• But prosecutors laughed off the very idea of “another Carlos,” claiming that DeLuna
had made the character up in his mind.
DeLuna was convicted of the crime.
• But an exhaustive investigation published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in
2012 details the case and effectively proves DeLuna’s innocence.
• Again, though, it’s cold comfort, as Texas executed DeLuna way back in 1989.
2 –Dewey Bozella • Dewey Bozella was accused of a murder
he didn’t commit, but the charges were dropped because there was no evidence linking him
to it.
• 6 years later, he was re-arrested for the crime.
Two inmates were offered the chance to testify against Bozella in exchange for their own
freedom – a deal they obviously took.
• That was enough to re-try Bozella, convict him, and put him away for 26 years.
• He was finally cleared of the charges and released in 2009.
1 –Jonathan Fleming • Jonathan Fleming was found guilty of a
murder in Brooklyn in 1989, and was sent to jail for nearly 25 years.
• There’s just one problem with that.
Fleming was on a trip to Disney World in Florida with his family at the time of the murder.
• Despite being on the other side of the country, Fleming was convicted on the strength
of one witness’s testimony, that was later thrown out for being full of inconsistencies.
• Fleming had a bill proving he made phone calls while in Florida, but during the trial,
authorities claimed there was no such receipt.
• During the appeal, the receipt was found in police records, stamped and dated, which
means the evidence that proved his innocence was either mishandled… or purposely withheld
from the trial.