Edward Constant II (born 1942/43) is a former Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, and convicted of aggravated assault and attempted homicide.
He earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 1977, and since 1976 had been a member of the Carnegie Mellon history department. He was noted for his publications on the evolution and impact of technology. In 1982 he was awarded the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) for his book titled "The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution."[ citation needed ] Constant's main theory was that engineering occurs in 'communities of technological practice'.
In 2004 was convicted by an Allegheny County jury trial of attempted homicide and aggravated assault. On May 26, 2002, a police officer came to the Constants' home on a domestic disturbance call after reports of Constant loud argument with his wife inside their home at night. The officer was shot in the chest by a .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, but survived the attack because he was wearing a bullet-proof vest. Constant was arrested after police shot him in the posterior, in a barrage of bullets. Constant's attorney used the defense that the professor and his wife were drunk when he committed the shooting. He was sentenced to 14½ to 29 years in prison. At the time of his sentence, Constant was 61 years old, and described as being in failing health.
The first trial was overturned after a juror came forward to report that Judge David Cashman's tipstaff, Mary Feeney, made inappropriate comments that could have swayed the panel. At a hearing before the administrative judge 10 jurors confirmed this and the administrative judge ordered a new trial for Constant in July 2004. He was reconvicted in 2005. [1] The sentence imposed was 14½ to 29 years in prison. [2]
In 2013, the conviction was again overturned and a new trial ordered. Constant pleaded guilty again and was sentenced to 11 to 25 years in prison. With credit for time served, he became eligible for parole. [3]
Francisco Martin Duran is an American criminal who is mostly known for his actions of October 29, 1994, when he fired 29 rounds from an SKS rifle at the White House. Duran was later convicted of attempting to assassinate United States president Bill Clinton and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
David Francis Bieber, also known under the alias Nathan Wayne Coleman, is an American convicted murderer. A fugitive from the United States, he murdered police constable (PC) Ian Broadhurst and attempted to murder PCs Neil Roper and James Banks on 26 December 2003 in Leeds, England, sparking a nationwide search before he was captured. He was given a whole life sentence after being found guilty of murder in December 2004 and the trial judge recommended that he should never be released; however, in 2008 this sentence was reduced to a minimum term of 37 years by the Court of Appeal, after which he could apply for parole.
A school shooting occurred on November 8, 2005, at Campbell County Comprehensive High School in Jacksboro, Tennessee, United States, when a 15-year-old freshman student shot the school principal and two assistant principals. One assistant principal, Ken Bruce, died as a result of the shooting.
Cory Jermaine Maye is a former American prisoner. He was originally convicted of murder in the 2001 death of Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer Ron W. Jones, during a drug raid on the other half of Maye's duplex.
William Gerald Zuern Jr. was an American convicted murderer who was executed by the state of Ohio for the murder of a Hamilton County sheriff's deputy working as a corrections officer in the county jail. Zuern spent 19 years and 7 months on death row, with lawyers fighting his death sentence. His execution occurred on the day before the 20th anniversary of the crime for which he was condemned.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Russel Timoshenko was a 23-year-old New York Police Department (NYPD) police officer who was shot on July 9, 2007, and died five days later, after pulling over a stolen BMW automobile in New York City's Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood. After a four-day manhunt that stretched across three states, all three suspects Dexter Bostic, Robert Ellis and Lee Woods were eventually apprehended and convicted—two of murder, and the third for weapons possession. At his widely attended funeral, Timoshenko was posthumously promoted to the rank of Detective. The case garnered national media attention because the weapons used were all illegally obtained handguns. This sparked widespread debate over gun control laws in New York City, and over the process by which firearms are traced by police departments.
On the morning of September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), ostensibly responding to a call from an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians at the Danziger Bridge: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were wounded. All of the victims were African-American. None were armed or had committed any crime. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. The shootings caused public anger and further eroded the community's trust in the NOPD and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina overall.
The Marin County Civic Center attacks were two related attacks in 1970 at the Marin County Superior Court, located in the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California, United States, tied to escalating racial tensions in the state's criminal justice system.
Jesus C. Gonzalez is an American man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, known for a gun rights civil lawsuit, as well as being convicted of a reckless homicide shooting.
The Howard Morgan case revolves around an incident that took place on February 21, 2005 in Chicago, Illinois. Howard Morgan, a retired officer of the Chicago Police Department, was shot 28 times by four active Chicago police officers: John Wrigley, Eric White, Timothy Finley and Nicolas Olsen. Morgan was accused of aggravated battery, discharging a firearm, and attempted murder; no charges were filed against the police officers. Morgan was found not guilty of battery or discharging a firearm in his 2007 trial; no verdict was returned on attempted murder. Morgan was tried a second time for attempted murder and convicted in January 2012. In April 2012, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. His case drew outrage from activists within Chicago and around the country. In January 2015, departing Illinois governor Pat Quinn granted him clemency.
The murder of Hadiya Pendleton occurred on January 29, 2013. Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl from Chicago, Illinois, was shot in the back and killed while standing with friends inside Harsh Park in Kenwood, Chicago after taking her final exams. As a student at King College Prep High School, she was killed only one week after performing at events for President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. First Lady Michelle Obama attended the funeral for Pendleton in Chicago.
Odin Leonardo John Lloyd was a semi-professional American football player in the New England Football League who was murdered by Aaron Hernandez, a former tight end for the New England Patriots of the National Football League, in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, on June 17, 2013. Lloyd's death made international headlines following Hernandez's association with the investigation as a suspect. Lloyd had been a linebacker for a New England Football League (NEFL) semi-professional football team, the Boston Bandits, since 2007.
Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old black man, was fatally shot on November 20, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, by a New York City Police Department officer. Two police officers, patrolling stairwells in the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)'s Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, entered a pitch-dark, unlit stairwell. Officer Peter Liang, 27, had his firearm drawn. Gurley and his girlfriend entered the seventh-floor stairwell, fourteen steps below them. Liang fired his weapon; the shot ricocheted off a wall and fatally struck Gurley in the chest. A jury convicted Liang of manslaughter, which a court later reduced to criminally negligent homicide.
The Pearcy murders took place on November 11 or 12, 2009, in Pearcy, Arkansas, a small town in the center of the state right outside of Hot Springs. A total of four related people and the girlfriend of one victim were shot to death during two burglaries; four bodies were found in a mobile home belonging to victims Edward Gentry Jr. and his wife Pam. The mobile home had been burned to destroy evidence. The fifth victim, Edward Gentry Sr., was found in another structure on the property. Jeremy Pickney, Marvin Stringer and Samuel Conway, all in their early twenties, were quickly identified as suspects due to their possessing stolen goods from the Gentry trailer. Stringer was killed during a shootout in a police raid when authorities attempted to arrest him at the Red Roof Inn on East Grand Ave.
Corey Miller, better known by his stage name C-Murder, is an American rapper. He initially gained fame in the mid-1990s as a part of his brother Master P's label No Limit Records, primarily as a member of the label's supergroup, TRU. Miller went on to release several solo albums of his own through the label, including 1998's platinum Life or Death. C-Murder has released nine albums altogether on six different labels, No Limit Records, TRU Records, Koch Records, Asylum Records, RBC Records, and Venti Uno.
On October 12, 2012, Ryan Carter Poston, an American attorney from Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, was shot to death by his on-again off-again girlfriend Shayna Michelle Hubers. After a trial in the Campbell County circuit court, Hubers was convicted of murder on April 23, 2015. She was sentenced to 40 years in the Kentucky Department of Corrections on August 14, 2015, with parole eligibility after 20 years. On August 25, 2016, Hubers' conviction was overturned on appeal when one of the jurors in her murder trial was revealed to be a convicted felon. Hubers was convicted of murder during her second trial on August 28, 2018. On October 18, 2018, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with parole eligibility after 20 years.
One-year-old Antonio Santiago was murdered on March 21, 2013, during an attempted robbery in Brunswick, Georgia, United States. As Santiago and his mother, Sherry West, were returning home from the post office, they were confronted by two youths, 15-year-old Dominique Lang and 17-year-old De'Marquise Elkins. Elkins, who had previously shot another victim he tried to rob, pointed a gun at West and demanded money. When she did not comply he fired two .22-caliber bullets, one of which grazed her head, and the other of which went through her leg. He then shot Santiago in the face, killing him. The murder received national as well as international attention due to the victim's young age.
On October 9, 2015, Steven Edward Jones, an 18-year-old freshman at Northern Arizona University, shot four people, killing Colin Charles Brough and severely injuring three others, in a parking lot outside of Mountain View Hall on the Flagstaff Mountain campus in Flagstaff, Arizona.