By Erin Moriarty When eyewitness testimony is wrong Eyewitness testimony, once considered the gold standard of evidence, can often result in wrongful convictions. Of those who have been exonerated by DNA evidence, it’s estimated that faulty eyewitness testimony is responsible…
By Adam Liptak WASHINGTON — “For 23 years, I was a jailhouse lawyer,” said Calvin Duncan, a former inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. “That was my assigned job.” He had a 10th-grade education, and he was serving…
By David Jacobs Recent legislation is changing how Louisiana’s legal system handles eyewitness testimony, the executive director of Innocence Project New Orleans said Monday. Jee Park told the Baton Rouge Press Club a law that went into effect this year…
By Emily Maw, Guest Columnist Those who regulate the legal profession would do well to observe the reaction of the Netflix-watching public to Ava DuVernay’s series, “When They See Us.” The series harrowingly chronicles the pain of five black and…
By Monique Judge In 1971, when Wilbert Jones was just 19 years old, he was arrested and charged with kidnapping a nurse at gunpoint from the parking lot of a hospital in Baton Rouge, La., and raping her behind a…
By Emily Lane Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday (June 5) signed a new law that allows for experts to testify in criminal trials about the science behind problems with eyewitness identifications. Forty-eight other states and the federal court system already…
BY NANCY FRANKLIN Thanks to the efforts of organizations like Innocence Project New Orleans, Louisiana has the second highest rate of exonerations per capita in the country. Such a statistic gives the state something to be proud of. But what…
BY LEA SKENE and JACQUELINE DEROBERTIS It was late one morning in December 1982 when a Baton Rouge housewife saw someone approaching her home in the city’s Hundred Oaks neighborhood. She opened the door a crack, unsure if it was…
By Thomas Fuller All it took was for technicians in a crime lab to run the fingerprints collected at the scene of a rape through a national database. Within hours, the experts had established a match with a serial rapist….
By Lea SkeneArchie Williams stepped out of the 19th Judicial District courthouse and into the sunshine Thursday afternoon surrounded by relatives and lawyers — his first taste of freedom after more than 36 years in prison for a crime he…
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