Yahweh ben Yahweh was an American religious leader, black separatist and black supremacist and founder of the Nation of Yahweh, a new religious movement headquartered in Florida that, at its peak, had thousands of black American devotees. He preached that Jesus was black and that "white devils" temporarily rule over black people, and was accused of teaching hate. Yahweh was indicted on three counts of federal racketeering and extortion charges, of which he was found not guilty. However, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
OVS is a Mexican American (Chicano) gang from Ontario, California.
Jesse Joseph Tafero was convicted of murder and executed via electric chair in the U.S. state of Florida for the murders of 39-year-old Florida Highway Patrol officer Phillip A. Black and 39-year-old Ontario Provincial Police Corporal Donald Irwin, a visiting Canadian constable and friend of Black. The officers were killed during a traffic stop where Tafero, his wife Sunny Jacobs and their children were passengers. Tafero's execution was botched; his head burst into flames during the execution by electric chair. After Tafero's execution, the driver, Walter Rhodes, confessed to shooting the officers, but later retracted his testimony.
Glennon Edward Engleman was an American dentist, contract killer, and serial killer. Engleman, a United States Army veteran and a St. Louis dentist, planned and carried out at least five murders for monetary gain over the course of 30 years. He was already serving two life sentences in a Missouri state prison when he pled guilty to the murder of a man and his wealthy parents in a separate contract killing that occurred in Illinois. Engleman was a sociopath, once stating that his talent was to kill without remorse, and he enjoyed planning and carrying out killings and disposing of the remains in order that it would net him financial rewards. His first known killing occurred in collaboration with his ex-wife. His ex-wife Ruth married another man, raised his life insurance and then Engleman killed him, both sharing the benefits. Later he would repeat these tactics for other murders.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Ripper Crew or the Chicago Rippers was an organized crime group of serial killers, cannibals, rapists, and necrophiles. The group composed of Robin Gecht and three associates: Edward Spreitzer, and brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis. They were suspected in the murders of 17 women in Illinois in 1981 and 1982, as well as the unrelated fatal shooting of a man in a random drive-by shooting. According to one of the detectives who investigated the case, Gecht "made Manson look like a Boy Scout."
Charles Noel Brown and Charles Edwin Kelley were American spree killers who killed three people and wounded three others in a five-day, three-state rampage in February 1961. The duo, who said they shot the victims to avoid leaving witnesses, were labeled the "Mad Dog Killers". Sentenced to death for a murder committed in Iowa, Brown and Kelley became the second-to-last and last people executed in the state, respectively. Iowa abolished capital punishment in 1965.
Jalil Abdul Muntaqim is a political activist and former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) who served 49 years in prison for two counts of first-degree murder. In August 1971, he was arrested in California along with Albert “Nuh” Washington and Herman Bell and charged with the killing of two NYPD police officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph A. Piagentini, in New York City on May 21. In 1975, he was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with possible parole after 22 years. Muntaqim had been the subject of attention for being repeatedly denied parole despite having been eligible since 1993. In June 2020, Muntaqim was reportedly sick with COVID-19. He was released from prison on October 7, 2020, after more than 49 years of incarceration and 11 parole denials.
On the evening of July 13, 1965, Hubert Damon Strange shot Willie Brewster as Brewster drove past him on Highway 202 outside Anniston, Alabama; two days later, Brewster died in a hospital. In December of that year, Strange was convicted of second degree murder; this was the first time in the history of Alabama that a white man was convicted of killing a black man in a racially-motivated murder case.
Lorenzo Fayne is an American serial killer and rapist who, between 1989 and 1993, murdered one woman and five children in the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. In 2001, he was convicted and sentenced to death, but the following year, in response to numerous miscarriages of justice in other cases, the Governor of Illinois George Ryan imposed a moratorium on capital punishment, commuting all prisoners' sentences to life imprisonment.
Leroy Keith was an American criminal and serial killer who killed three people in Ohio and New York during robberies. Originally sentenced to death twice in Ohio, he was released on parole and went on to kill two more people before being summarily executed at Sing Sing in 1959.
Laron Ronald Williams was an American serial killer. Originally convicted in the 1977 murder of a prostitute in Nashville, Tennessee and suspected in at least two similar killings, Williams later escaped from prison and murdered a police officer and a priest within days of one another in 1981. He was separately sentenced to death for both murders, but was killed by fellow inmates on death row in 1985 before he could be executed.
Raymond Lee Stewart was an American robber and spree killer who murdered six people during a week-long rampage in Rockford, Illinois and Beloit, Wisconsin in 1981. Stewart was sentenced to death for the murders he committed in Illinois and was executed in 1996 at Stateville Correctional Center.
Girvies L. Davis and Richard "Ricky" Holman were American serial killers who killed at least four people during robberies in Illinois between 1978 and 1979. Davis, the older of the two, told an investigator that shooting witnesses was "easier" than wearing a mask. The two were nicknamed "The .22 Caliber Killers". Davis was executed in 1995, while Holman, too young to be executed, is serving a life sentence.
Randy William Gay is an American serial killer who killed three people, including his father-in-law and his biological father, with a shotgun during arguments between 1978 and 2011. He served time in prison for each of the first two murders, and was sentenced to death for the third murder.
Manuel Machado Alvarez was a Cuban murderer who was sentenced to death in California. In 1987, while on parole for voluntary manslaughter, he murdered a man during a robbery, a crime for which he was sentenced to die.
Walter Hill was an American serial killer who killed five people between 1952 and 1977. He was convicted of capital murder, sentenced to death, and executed at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama in 1997.
Glynn Ray Simmons is an American man who was wrongfully convicted in the U.S. state of Oklahoma in 1975 of the 1974 murder of Carolyn Sue Rogers. After having been exonerated, he was released from prison in 2023 at the age of 70, after having been imprisoned for 48 years.
