A pardon is a government decision to allow a person to be relieved of some or all of the legal consequences resulting from a criminal conviction. A pardon may be granted before or after conviction for the crime, depending on the laws of the jurisdiction.
The Brown's Chicken massacre was a mass murder that occurred on January 8, 1993, in Palatine, Illinois, when two robbers shot and killed seven employees at a Brown's Chicken fast-food restaurant.
The Groveland Four were four African American teens, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. In July 1949, the four were accused of raping a white woman and severely beating her husband in Lake County, Florida. The oldest, Thomas, tried to elude capture and was killed that month. The others were put on trial. Shepard and Irvin received death sentences, and Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. The events of the case led to serious questions about the arrests, allegedly coerced confessions and mistreatment, and the unusual sentencing following their convictions. Their incarceration was exacerbated by their systemic and unlawful treatment—including the death of Shepherd, and the near-fatal shooting of Irvin. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and Irvin in 1968. All four were posthumously exonerated by the state of Florida in 2021.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Opponents of capital punishment often cite cases of wrongful execution as arguments, while proponents argue that innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Willem Frederik Holleeder is a Dutch gangster, outlaw biker and convicted criminal. He is nicknamed De Neus because of the size of his nose.
The towpath murders are a double murder which occurred upon a section of towpath between Teddington Lock and Eel Pie Island in Richmond upon Thames, London, England, on 31 May 1953. The victims were two teenage girls named Christine Reed and Barbara Songhurst who were ambushed by a lone individual as they cycled to their respective homes in Hampton Hill and Teddington. Both girls were overpowered, then violently raped and murdered before their bodies were discarded in the River Thames. The perpetrator, 21-year-old Alfred Charles Whiteway, was convicted of both murders in a trial held at the Old Bailey before Mr Justice Hilbery that October; he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 22 December 1953.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.
Texas v. Cobb, 532 U.S. 162 (2001), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is offense-specific and does not always extend to offenses that are closely related to those where the right has been attached. This decision reaffirmed the Court's holding in McNeil v. Wisconsin (1991) by concluding that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel attaches at the onset of adversarial proceedings.
The Blue Diamond Affair is a series of unresolved crimes and embittered diplomatic relations triggered by the 1989 theft of gems belonging to the House of Saud by a Thai employee. The affair has soured relations between Saudi Arabia and Thailand for over 30 years.
Asa Palmer French was an American attorney who served as the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts from 1906 to 1914.
Jake Bird was an American serial killer who was executed in Washington for the 1947 murders of two women in Tacoma. He is also known to have murdered at least eleven other people across several states between 1930 and 1947. Prior to his execution Bird had implicated himself in up to 46 murders.
Joe Freeman Britt was an American attorney and judge who developed a national reputation as a tough prosecutor, and for successfully pursuing a large number of death penalty convictions. He was also well known by the judicial system for accusations of misconduct, including Brady violations, i.e. hiding or failing to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence from the defence, in approximately one third of his cases.
Barry Allan Beach is an American who was sentenced to 100 years in prison without parole in 1984 for the 1979 murder of Kimberly Nees in Poplar, Montana. During the years following his conviction, Beach gained support from influential state and national advocates who said his murder confession, the lynchpin of his conviction, was coerced. In 2015, his sentence was commuted to time served, plus ten years on probation.
Making a Murderer is an American true crime documentary television series written and directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. The show tells the story of Steven Avery, a man from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who served 18 years in prison (1985–2003) after his wrongful conviction for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beerntsen. He was later charged with and convicted of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach. The connected story is that of Avery's nephew Brendan Dassey, who was accused and convicted as an accessory in the murder of Halbach.
The president of the United States is authorized by the U.S. Constitution to grant a pardon for a federal crime. The other forms of the clemency power of the president are commutation of sentence, remission of fine or restitution, and reprieve. A person may decide not to accept a pardon, in which case it does not take effect, according to a Supreme Court majority opinion in Burdick v. United States. In 2021, the 10th Circuit ruled that acceptance of a pardon does not constitute a legal confession of guilt, recognizing the Supreme Court's earlier language as authoritative.
The murder of Catherine Fuller was a violent sexual assault and murder which occurred in Washington, D.C. in 1984.
The Johnny Lee Wilson case refers to the murder of seventy-nine-year-old Pauline Martz of Aurora, Missouri in 1986 that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of a twenty-year-old man named Johnny Lee Wilson. He had confessed to the murder days after it occurred. As a result of a guilty plea, Wilson did not receive a trial by a jury, and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in 1987. He was incarcerated from 1986 to 1995.
Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown are two African American men who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for a murder they did not commit.
