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Isabella Belfer is a sixty-nine-year-old Russian-born Israeli woman convicted of kidnapping in Israel and was the oldest person incarcerated in Israel, until she was granted a pardon in 2010. Her case was made famous through RT, an English language Russian news service, while the Israeli media paid little attention to the case.
Belfer returned to Israel in 2006 to assist her ailing mother. Rottem located her and pressed kidnapping charges. Belfer was arrested and put on trial for kidnapping.
Before her trial, Belfer suffered a mild heart attack and had to undergo surgery. Belfer's defense claimed that she was too old to survive prison conditions and would die even if sentenced to one day. She herself expressed worry about going to prison. She had stated that she wondered how long she could survive in prison. Despite claims that she was too old, she was found guilty of kidnapping on January 27, 2008 and sentenced to six years in prison by Judge Oded Mudric, who in the sentencing, stated that Belfer was guilty of "causing fatal [emotional] injuries by not allowing [Yaron Rottem] to be a parent". Michael Yarnin, her lawyer, attempted to overturn the sentence by appealing to the Supreme Court of Israel, but this proved unsuccessful. Her lawyer began trying to obtain a pardon from Israeli president Shimon Peres. After serving her first six months, an Israeli court reduced Belfer's term to three years in prison. After the trial concluded, Belfer was deeply distressed and stated that she felt weak both morally and physically.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system.
Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004), held that, in the context of mandatory sentencing guidelines under state law, the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial prohibited judges from enhancing criminal sentences based on facts other than those decided by the jury or admitted by the defendant. The landmark nature of the case was alluded to by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who characterized the decision as a "Number 10 earthquake".
Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov was a Russian military officer convicted by a Russian court of kidnapping and murder of Elza Kungayeva in Chechnya.
In the Pitcairn sexual assault trial of 2004 seven men living on Pitcairn Island faced 55 charges relating to sexual offences against children and young people. The accused represented a third of the island's male population and included Steve Christian, the mayor. On 24 October, all but one of the defendants were found guilty on at least some of the charges. Another six men living abroad, including Shawn Christian, who later served as mayor of Pitcairn, were tried on 41 charges in a separate trial in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2005.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Choo Han Teck is a Singaporean judge of the Supreme Court.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was arrested, tried, and convicted for a number of crimes related to corruption and human rights abuses that occurred during his government. Fujimori was president from 1990 to 2000. His presidency ended when he fled the country in the midst of a scandal involving corruption and human rights violations.
Robert Lee Willie was an American serial killer who killed at least three people in Louisiana from the late 1970s to 1980. He was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Faith Hathaway and executed in 1984.
Florence Marie Louise Cassez Crépin is a French woman convicted in Mexico of belonging to the kidnapping gang Los Zodíacos. She received a 60-year sentence for the crimes of kidnapping, organized crime, and illegal possession of firearms. The sentence and a possible extradition to her home country created diplomatic tensions between France and Mexico. Cassez denies all charges.
Sabrina De Sousa is a Portuguese-American ex-CIA operative convicted of kidnapping. In 2009 she was convicted of kidnapping in Italy for her role in the 2003 abduction of the Muslim imam Abu Omar, who was kidnapped in Milan and subsequently tortured. Sousa was sentenced to four years in prison for her role in the kidnapping. A European Arrest Warrant valid throughout Europe was subsequently issued for her arrest, and she was arrested in Portugal under that arrest warrant in 2015. She was due to be extradited back to Italy to serve her sentence, having exhausted her appeal rights against her extradition in Portugal, when the President of Italy issued her a pardon ending extradition proceedings against her in February 2017. She was still due to serve community service when she left Italy for the US in October 2019 citing fears for her safety.
Jamie and Gladys Scott, often referred to as the Scott sisters, are two African-American sisters who were convicted of orchestrating a 1993 armed robbery in Forest, Mississippi, after accomplices made a plea deal. Each sister received double life sentences, This sentence has been criticized as too severe by a number of civil rights activists and prominent commentators on the grounds that the sisters had no previous criminal record and the robbery netted no more than eleven dollars.
Rape in Saudi Arabia is regulated by Islamic law, which is the basis for the legal system of Saudi Arabia. Under Islamic law, the punishment which a court can impose on the rapist may range from flogging to execution. However, there is no penal code in Saudi Arabia, and there is no written law which specifically criminalizes rape or prescribes its punishment. In addition, there is no prohibition of marital rape.
In May 2014, Isidro Medrano Garcia, who had been living under the name Tomas Medrano or Tomas Madrano, was arrested and accused by police of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl in 2004 and repeatedly raping her and continuing to hold her captive until 2014. Garcia was accused of forcing the alleged victim to marry him in 2007. As time moved on, the woman had a child with Garcia on October 27, 2010, or in 2012, and they continued to live openly together as a family in Bell Gardens, California, until the woman contacted her sister through Facebook and met with her mother in April 2014. She filed a domestic violence complaint with Bell Gardens police on May 19, 2014. As a married couple, Garcia and the woman had an apparently active social life in the community, including hosting large parties and the woman spending time and running errands by herself, having her own car, and working outside the home. However, police said the woman had tried to escape twice and been severely beaten. Through his attorney, Garcia claimed that the woman made up the story of abuse because the couple was breaking up.
The killing of Jennifer Laude occurred on October 11, 2014, in Olongapo, Philippines, when 26-year-old Filipina trans woman was drowned to death by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a 19-year-old Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps. Pemberton admitted assaulting Laude and deployed a trans panic defense in his 2015 trial. His charge was downgraded from murder to homicide by a judge in 2015, and he was convicted on December 1, 2015. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte granted an absolute pardon to Pemberton in September 2020.
Rasmea Yousef Odeh in Arabic رسمية يوسف عودة is a Palestinian Jordanian and former American citizen who was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine convicted by Israeli military courts for her role in the murder of two students, Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe in the 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing. After her release in a prisoner exchange, she immigrated to the United States, became a U.S. citizen illegally, and served as associate director at the Arab American Action Network in Chicago, Illinois.
Mary Prince is an African American woman wrongly convicted of murder who then became the nanny for Amy Carter, the daughter of US President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter, and was eventually granted a full pardon.
Sisters Seema Mohan Gavit and Renuka Kiran Shinde are Indian serial killers convicted of kidnapping thirteen children and killing five of them between 1990 and 1996. In association with their mother Anjanabai, they were active in various cities in western Maharashtra - Pune, Thane, Kalyan, Kolhapur, and Nashik. The reason for kidnapping the children was to take them to crowded places where one of the trio would try to steal people’s belongings. If the thief was caught, she would either try to evoke sympathy through the child, or create a distraction by hurting it. The kidnapped child would later be killed.
The 2019 Cyprus rape allegation case was a high-profile case of alleged gang rape in Cyprus. In July 2019, a British woman on holiday in Ayia Napa alleged she had been gang raped by twelve Israeli tourists. The Israeli men were subsequently arrested and investigated over the allegation by the Cyprus Police, but they were subsequently released without charge and the woman was charged for making a false allegation. In January 2020, the woman was convicted of "public mischief" in a Cypriot court and received a suspended sentence. Her conviction was overturned in 2022 by the Cypriot Supreme Court on the grounds that she had not received a fair trial. The woman has maintained that she was pressured to retract her statement, something contested by Cypriot authorities. The case triggered intense international scrutiny.
The murder of Rachael Anderson occurred on January 28, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. Anderson, a twenty-four-year-old aspiring funeral director, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by Anthony Pardon in her apartment on her birthday. Pardon, a registered sex offender with an extensive criminal history, left Anderson's body in her bedroom closet where she was discovered the next day. A significant amount of evidence linked Pardon to the crime, including cellphone data and DNA. He was arrested and charged with Anderson's murder. He was convicted in 2020 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Donald Cotesworth Gellers, also known by his Jewish name Tuvia Ben-Shmuel Yosef, was an American lawyer. In the 1960s he lived in Eastport, Maine, where he represented members of the Passamaquoddy tribe in court and advocated for their civil rights. In 1968 he filed a land claim suit on the tribe's behalf. Immediately after filing the suit he was charged with constructive possession of six marijuana cigarettes. He was convicted on a felony charge and sentenced to prison. After an unsuccessful appeal process, he moved to Israel without serving his sentence. He returned to the United States in 1980 and practiced as a rabbi until his death. In 2020 he was granted a posthumous pardon by the state of Maine.
