Jaime Rios is a judge on the New York Supreme Court for Queens County. Prior to sitting on the Supreme Court, Judge Rios served on the New York City Civil Court and the Housing Court. Judge Rios holds a B.S. degree from City College of New York, a M.A. degree from New York University, and a law degree from Fordham University School of Law. Following law school, Judge Rios was a prosecutor in Kings County and later an attorney for the New York City Police Department. He also teaches landlord/tenant law at Fordham as an adjunct professor. He is also a co-chair of Fordham's Minority Mentorship Program for law students. Judge Rios retired from the bench in December 2013. Many attorneys mourned his retirement, noting that he was a consistent and fair jurist whose understanding of the law was generally above reproach.
In 2005, Judge Rios' conduct in the second murder trial of Tyronne Johnson came under scrutiny. Johnson's first conviction for the murder of nightclub owner Leroy Vann was overturned by Judge Rios when it was revealed that a prosecutor lied about the whereabouts of a defense witness. [1] Judith Memblatt, the judge's former law clerk, accused him of improperly coaching the prosecutor in the second trial, Eugene Riebstein. [2] Based on Memblatt's allegations, Johnson's defense attorney Ron Kuby sought to overturn this second conviction. [2] In support of the motion to vacate the conviction, Kuby took the unorthodox step of calling Judge Rios as a witness to address the allegation, [3] but Rios denied any misconduct. Memblatt has gone on to become a blogger highly critical of the New York state judiciary as a whole. [4] In October 2006, Judge Matthew D'Emic denied Johnson's motion to overturn the conviction, finding no misconduct on Rios' part. [5]
In jurisprudence, prosecutorial misconduct or prosecutorial overreach is "an illegal act or failing to act, on the part of a prosecutor, especially an attempt to sway the jury to wrongly convict a defendant or to impose a harsher than appropriate punishment." It is similar to selective prosecution. Prosecutors are bound by a set of rules which outline fair and dispassionate conduct.
William Moses Kunstler was an American attorney and civil rights activist, known for defending the Chicago Seven. Kunstler was an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country."
Prejudice is a legal term with different meanings, which depend on whether it is used in criminal, civil, or common law. In legal context, prejudice differs from the more common use of the word and so the term has specific technical meanings.
Ronald L. Kuby is an American criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, radio talk show host and television commentator. He has also hosted radio programs on WABC Radio in New York City and Air America radio.
James Alan Gell is an American who was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder in 1998 and sentenced to death in Bertie County, North Carolina, at the age of 22. He served nine years as an inmate on death row before being acquitted in a second trial in 2004; he was freed from prison and exonerated that year. He was the 113th person to be freed from death row in the United States.
Shareef Cousin is an African-American man from New Orleans who was convicted of the first-degree murder of Michael Gerardi in 1996 and sentenced to death as a juvenile in Louisiana. At age 17, he became the youngest condemned convict to be put on death row in Louisiana, and one of the youngest in the United States.
Edward Earl Carnes is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
John Fontaine Keenan is a senior United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Edward Willis Nottingham Jr. is a former United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, having served in that office from November 24, 1989, until his resignation on October 21, 2008, after a year of scandal.
Bruce McMarion Wright was an American jurist who served on the New York State Supreme Court. Judge Wright was also the father of Geoffrey D.S. Wright, a New York State Supreme Court Justice, and Keith L.T. Wright, a member of the New York State Assembly.
Curtis Giovanni Flowers is an American man who was tried for murder six times in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal. Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shooting deaths of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, seat of Montgomery County. Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, sought the death penalty against Flowers. As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.
Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51 (2011), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court considered whether a prosecutor's office can be held liable for a single Brady violation by one of its members on the theory that the office provided inadequate training.
The murder of Mark Fisher occurred in the early morning hours of October 12, 2003, when the 19-year-old college student was brutally beaten, shot five times, and left on Argyle Road in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn.
The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.
Ryan W. Ferguson is an American man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high-school student.
Louis N. Scarcella is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who earned frequent commendations during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and 1990s, before many convictions resulting from his investigations were overturned during his retirement. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, leading to innocent parties serving long prison terms and guilty individuals going free.
Robert Thomas Johnson is an American attorney and jurist serving as a justice of the New York State Supreme Court in the county of the Bronx. He was previously a New York City Criminal Court judge, an acting justice of the New York State Supreme Court, and a long-time Bronx County district attorney in New York City.
Darcel Denise Clark is an American attorney and prosecutor who has served as the Bronx County District Attorney since 2016. Clark is the first woman to hold that office, and the first woman of color to serve as a district attorney in the history of the State of New York.
Jabbar Collins is an American man who served 16 years for a crime he did not commit. He was convicted of second-degree murder following the February 1994 death of Orthodox rabbi Abraham Pollack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The 20-year-old Collins, who lived in a nearby housing project, was arrested and charged with the murder. In March 1995, he was sentenced by a jury to 34-years-to-life in prison, sixteen of which he served.
Isaac Wright Jr. is an American attorney, businessman, and philanthropist. He is best known for being falsely accused and convicted as a drug lord and sentenced to life in prison in 1991 facing 10 charges involving the sale of cocaine. His conviction was overturned in 1997 after litigation brought by him on the basis of police corruption during his investigation and the prosecutor’s knowing presentation of perjured testimony at his trial. His story is depicted in the television drama/series production For Life, which premiered in 2020 on American Broadcasting Company. He was a candidate for mayor of New York City in the 2021 New York City mayoral election.