Tag Archives: Wrongful conviction

Ava DuVernay’s new Netflix series sheds light on the horrors of wrongful incarceration

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“The time that we lost, we can’t get that back,” Kevin Richardson told NBC’s Lester Holt in an interview along with the group. “We lost our youth, our youthful years.”Their stories are profiled in the upcoming Netflix series “When They See Us,” a four-episode drama which was directed and co-written by Ava DuVernay. The limited series chronicles the journeys of the five men over the course of 25 years through their trials to their release from prison.“I always go back to whose story am I telling and is this choice helping to tell their story, in the most dynamic way, the most truthful way, for them,”

DuVernay told Holt.DuVernay, known for directing social justice films like “Selma” and big budget movies like “A Wrinkle in Time,” felt it was critical to tell the story of how false confessions landed the five teenagers in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Source: Ava DuVernay’s new Netflix series sheds light on the horrors of wrongful incarceration

Time Served-Justice Still Denied: the Wrongful Conviction of Rodney K. Stanberry | freerodneystanberry.com Blog

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Rodney K. Stanberry- Innocent and Incarcerated for 20 Years

Rodney K. Stanberry spent 20 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. He received three 20 year sentences to be served concurrently for burglary, attempted murder, and robbery.   He was arrested in 1992, convicted in 1995 and began serving a prison sentence in 1997.   He left prison on March 13th, 2017.  Like Thompson, like Williams and Myers, like Michael Morton, like so many others, his case should have been an open and shut case.  The prosecutor had a confession from another individual who was actually present when the crimes took place. The individual who confessed did so BEFORE Rodney’s trial.  He had one of the best attorneys in Mobile, AL as his attorney and his attorney told the prosecutor that he would tell him everything.  Why would he do this? Because the person who confessed thought the prosecutor was actually interested in arresting and convicting the actual culprits. He knew an eyewitness on the ground saw him as he was exiting the victim’s home. He thought he was caught.  He, the person who actually was one of the two people present when the victim was brutally shot, got a firsthand view of how prosecutors will let the guilty go free in order to convict the innocent. And less he thought it was just one prosecutor, Joe Carl Buzz Jordan, he would discover that on Rodney’s appeal, another prosecutor also with the Mobile District Attorney’s Office would go out of her way to ensure that he did not say in court what she knew he would say. So she said if you talk, you are going to get life. She did not want him to go on record to tell the truth, for that would mean that the record further reflected that the Mobile District Attorney’s Office convicted an innocent man.  Upholding the conviction should not be more important than letting an innocent man out of prison.   http://www.freerodneystanberry.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/tierny_redo.9113550.pdf)

 

Source: Time Served-Justice Still Denied: the Wrongful Conviction of Rodney K. Stanberry | freerodneystanberry.com Blog