60 Minutes – Evidence of Innocence: The case of Michael Morton
After nearly 25 years in prison, Michael Morton was exonerated by a DNA test. Did a prosecutor hide evidence that could have proven Morton’s innocence during his 1987 trial?
Richmond Times-Dispatch – With new DNA evidence, man asks for name to be cleared
Credit: JOE MAHONEY/TIMES-DISPATCH
Bennett S. Barbour has asked the Virginia Supreme Court for a writ of innocence.
Published: March 07, 2012
Updated: March 07, 2012 – 12:02 AM
A Charles City County man convicted of a 1978 rape in Williamsburg is asking the Virginia Supreme Court for exoneration in light of new DNA evidence.
In 2010, testing failed to identify Bennett S. Barbour’s DNA in seminal fluid found on the victim’s underwear — but there was a “cold hit” on a convicted sex offender who has yet to be named by authorities.
“This is an egregious miscarriage of justice,” Barbour’s lawyers with the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law wrote in a petition for a writ of actual innocence filed Tuesday.
Barbour, 56, under treatment for cancer, always has maintained his innocence. He was arrested when he was 22 in the Feb. 7, 1978, rape of a 19-year-old College of William and Mary student.
NYTimes – When Innocence Is Not Enough
By RAYMOND BONNER
EDWARD LEE ELMORE turned 53 in January. For more than half his life, the soft-spoken African-American who doesn’t understand the concept of north, south, east and west, or of summer, fall, winter and spring, was in a South Carolina prison, most of it on death row.
Mary Ann Chastain/Associated Press
Edward Lee Elmore was in prison for 30 years, convicted of a crime that the evidence strongly suggests he did not commit.
On Friday, Mr. Elmore walked out of the courthouse in Greenwood, S.C., a free man, as part of an agreement with the state whereby he denied any involvement in the crime but pleaded guilty in exchange for his freedom. This was his 11,000th day in jail.