This archive already carries two accounts of wrongful conviction: one told through the people who were imprisoned, and one, NINETEEN TIMES THE WRONG MAN WENT DOWN, told from the killer's side. Both are about the error. These five are about what happened after the error was correctable. In each of them a confession or a test that would have freed an innocent man was available, and the institution holding it would not take it.
Two cases set the boundary, and neither is one of the five.
Laverne Pavlinac invented a story that her boyfriend John Sosnovske had killed Taunja Bennett, to get away from him. She led detectives to the scene and gave details that fitted. Both were convicted in 1991. Keith Jesperson was arrested in March 1995 for a different killing, confessed, and his confession freed them later that same year. Four years, and the correction was accepted as soon as it arrived. Those convictions remain the most-cited example in American law of a false confession surviving to a verdict, and the exoneration is the fast one.
Anthony Capozzi, a Buffalo man with schizophrenia, was convicted in 1987 of two rapes on victim identifications and served twenty-two years. The man who had committed them, Altemio Sanchez, was identified in January 2007 through a familial DNA search and a discarded cup; his DNA also matched the rapes Capozzi was serving for, and Capozzi was released that March. Twenty-two years is a monstrous thing to lose, but nothing was refused. The technique that identified Sanchez did not exist for most of the time Capozzi was inside, and once it existed the correction took two months. That is the difference this article is about.
Eric Edgar Cooke confessed twice to killings two other men were serving for, once under sentence of death. The Western Australian courts refused for four decades to accept it. John Button, convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend Rosemary Anderson, did not have his conviction quashed until 2002. Darryl Beamish, a deaf man sentenced to death for the murder of Jillian Brewer and reprieved, waited until 2005. Cooke had been dead thirty-eight and forty-one years respectively. What eventually freed Button was forensic crash reconstruction that did not exist in 1963, and what freed Beamish was the weight of the Button ruling. The confession of the man who did it was not what did it.
Zhao Zhihong confessed in 2005 to a killing for which Huugjilt had been shot in 1996, at eighteen. The authorities did not act on it for nine years. The Inner Mongolia High Court quashed the conviction in December 2014 and declared Huugjilt innocent; his family were awarded compensation and twenty-seven officials involved in the original case were disciplined or investigated. The disciplining is the part to hold on to. It establishes that there was something to act on in 2005.
Wang Shujin's confession contained details of the killing of Kang Juhua, for which Nie Shubin had been shot in 1995, ten months after his arrest. The courts declined to attribute it to him. He was convicted of three other murders, the Kang case excluded, and the Hebei High Court twice rejected his account of it on the ground that his confession did not match the evidence. Wang was executed in February 2013. Nie's conviction was quashed in 2016. Nobody now stands convicted of Kang Juhua's death.
Brian Dugan confessed to a murder for which Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez had been convicted and sentenced to death. The DuPage County prosecutors did not accept the confession and went on defending those convictions through years of appeals and retrials. Cruz's conviction was overturned three times. At a third trial in 1995 a police lieutenant admitted that a crucial piece of testimony against Cruz, a supposed dream statement, had never happened. Both men were eventually freed and exonerated, which is what separates this from the case below: the refusal here ran for two decades and was survived.
Frank Lee Smith was convicted in 1986 of the rape and murder of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead on eyewitness identification, and sentenced to death. He spent fourteen years on death row maintaining his innocence and was refused DNA testing while he was alive. He died there of cancer in January 2000. The testing was carried out after his death; it excluded him and matched Eddie Lee Mosley. He is the first person in the United States shown by DNA to have been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death after already dying in custody. Mosley has never been convicted of anything: he was found incompetent to stand trial in 1988 and committed to a state psychiatric institution, so the DNA match is what the record rests on and no court has tested it. Jerry Frank Townsend, convicted of killings the evidence attributes to Mosley, served twenty-two years, and Broward County prosecutors moved to vacate his convictions in 2001.
The five divide by what the institution was being asked to accept. Cooke, Zhao, Wang and Dugan all confessed, and in each case a court or a prosecutor decided the confession was not good enough. Smith asked for a test that existed and was told no, and the same test was run on him once he was dead. Neither kind of refusal is a failure of information. Both are decisions.
It is worth being precise about what was being defended. In Wang Shujin's case the Hebei High Court held that his confession did not match the evidence, which is a legitimate thing for a court to find and might have been right. But he was executed and Nie Shubin was exonerated anyway, and the position that survives is that two men have died over one killing that neither of them stands convicted of. In Dugan's case prosecutors kept two men on death row rather than accept an account that turned out to be true.
Set the five against Jesperson and Capozzi and the pattern is not that these corrections were hard to obtain. Pavlinac and Sosnovske were out within the year. Capozzi was out within two months of the evidence existing. The difference is not the quality of the evidence or the speed of the science. It is whether anyone with the power to act was prepared to be wrong in public.
Editor's note: this article was written from this archive's own roster and covers five cases. The Jesperson and Sanchez cases are included as counter-examples and are deliberately not part of the count: in both, the correction was accepted as soon as it was available, which is the comparison the piece is built on. An earlier version of this article ran with seven, counting Altemio Sanchez and Abul Djabar among them; neither entry records anything held and refused, and they were removed. Two points of care remain. Wang Shujin was convicted of three murders and executed, and the Kang Juhua killing he confessed to was excluded from his case, so he is not recorded here as convicted of it. Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on death row and was not executed. The companion pieces are NINETEEN TIMES THE WRONG MAN WENT DOWN and TWELVE CASES WHERE THE CONVICTION DID NOT HOLD.