William Laws Calley Jr. is an American war criminal and a former United States Army officer convicted by court-martial for the premeditated killings of 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the Mỹ Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. Calley was released to house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction. A new trial was ordered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit but that ruling was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Calley served three years of house arrest for the murders. Public opinion about Calley was divided.
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time.
The Toy is a 1982 American comedy film directed by Richard Donner. The film stars Richard Pryor, Jackie Gleason, Ned Beatty, Scott Schwartz, Teresa Ganzel, and Virginia Capers. It is an adaptation of the 1976 French comedy film Le Jouet.
Stir Crazy is a 1980 American comedy film directed by Sidney Poitier, produced by Hannah Weinstein and written by Bruce Jay Friedman. The film stars Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor as unemployed friends who are given 125-year prison sentences after being framed for a bank robbery. While in prison they befriend other prison inmates. The film reunited Wilder and Pryor, who had appeared previously in the 1976 comedy thriller film Silver Streak. The film was released in the United States on December 12, 1980 to mixed critical reviews and was a major financial success.
William Holcombe Pryor Jr. is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He is a former Commissioner of the United States Sentencing Commission. Previously, he was the Attorney General of Alabama, from 1997 to 2004.
Clinton Correctional Facility is a New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision maximum security state prison for men located in the Village of Dannemora, New York. The prison is sometimes colloquially referred to as Dannemora, although its name is derived from its location in Clinton County, New York. The southern perimeter wall of the prison borders New York State Route 374. Church of St. Dismas, the Good Thief, a church built by inmates, is located within the walls. The prison is sometimes referred to as New York's Little Siberia, due to the cold winters in Dannemora and the isolation of the upstate area. It is the largest maximum security prison and the third oldest prison in New York. The staff includes about a thousand officers and supervisors.
Paul Gladney, better known by the stage name Paul Mooney, is an American comedian, writer, social critic, and television and film actor. He is best known as a writer for comedian Richard Pryor; playing singer Sam Cooke in The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and Junebug in Bamboozled (2000); and his appearances on Chappelle's Show.
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling is a 1986 American biographical comedy-drama film directed, produced by and starring Richard Pryor, who also wrote the screenplay with Paul Mooney and Rocco Urbisci. This was the first and only feature film Pryor directed.
The Detroit Sleeper Cell is a group of men of Middle-Eastern descent who the United States Department of Justice believed were plotting an attack on Disneyland.
Some Kind of Hero is a 1982 American comedy-drama film starring Richard Pryor as a returning Vietnam War veteran having trouble adjusting to civilian life. Soon he is involved in an organized crime heist. It co-stars Margot Kidder and was directed by Michael Pressman.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Ross William Ulbricht is an American who created and operated the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013. The site used Tor for anonymity and bitcoin as a currency and facilitated the sale of narcotics and other illegal sales. Ulbricht's online pseudonym was "Dread Pirate Roberts" after the fictional character in the novel The Princess Bride and its film adaptation.
Cecil Brown is an African-American writer and educator. He is a published novelist, short story writer, script writer, and college educator. His noted works include The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) and work on the 1977 Richard Pryor film Which Way Is Up? as a screenwriter.
Michael Elliot Epps is an American stand-up comedian, actor, film producer, writer, and rapper. He is best known for playing Day-Day Jones in Next Friday and its sequel, Friday After Next, and also appearing in The Hangover as "Black Doug". He was the voice of Boog in Open Season 2. As of 2010, Epps was the executive producer on a documentary about the life story of a former member of Tupac Shakur's Outlawz, Napoleon: Life of an Outlaw. He is also known for playing Lloyd Jefferson "L.J." Wade in Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007).
Strange Wives is a 1934 American comedy film directed by Richard Thorpe, written by James Mulhauser, Barry Trivers, and Gladys Buchanan Unger, and starring Roger Pryor, June Clayworth, Esther Ralston, Hugh O'Connell, Ralph Forbes and Cesar Romero. It was released on December 10, 1934, by Universal Pictures.
Richard William Huckle was a convicted English serial sex offender and child rapist. He was arrested by Britain's National Crime Agency after a tip-off from Australian Police and convicted of 71 counts of serious sexual assaults against children while working as a freelance photographer and posing as a Christian teacher in Malaysia.
A federal pardon in the United States is the action of the President of the United States that completely sets aside the punishment for a federal crime. The authority to take such action is granted to the president by Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. A pardon is one form of the clemency power of the president, the others being 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 a pardon "carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it".
Richard Wershe Jr., known as White Boy Rick, became a Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) informant when he was 14 to 16 years old. When he was 15, Wershe told the FBI that a major drug dealer had spoken of paying a bribe to Detroit detective inspector and subsequent city council president and mayoral candidate Gil Hill in order to quash the investigation into a 13 year old boy's murder. At the age of 17 Wershe was arrested for possession of 8 kg of cocaine, and with no intervention from the FBI and U.S. Attorney to tell of him being an FBI informant at 14, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2017 justice campaigners publicized Wershe's case and he was paroled, but directly to a prison in Florida to serve another five years for an auto theft conviction from 2008. Campaigners for Wershe have suggested to reporters that the length of his incarceration may have been connected to him having provided the FBI with information leading to the arrest of family members and associates of former Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young, as well as the allegation about Young's political ally Gil Hill. In 2016 a notorious former Detroit hitman alleged Hill had once tried to commission the murder of Wershe.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020) was the first autobiographical book written by the Korean American author Cathy Park Hong. It was published by One World in the United States of America and Profile Books in the United Kingdom and is composed of 7 essays about growing up as an Asian-American in a Western capitalist society, more specifically in the United States of America. This book won the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography in 2020.
