 |
The Signal Mountain murders refers to a widely publicized case in 1988 involving the shootings of Richard Mason, Kenneth Griffith, and Earl Smock near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
|
The Signal Mountain murders refers to a widely publicized case in 1988 involving the shootings of Richard Mason, Kenneth Griffith, and Earl Smock near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The three men had been riding the backwoods of Signal Mountain. The men were missing and being searched for by their relatives when they did not return home. The bodies were found off Big Fork Road near the community of Suck Creek by a resident while their all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) were found down an embankment on the side of Roberts Mill Road.
The owners of the land were Frank Casteel and his wife, Susie. When Frank noticed more and more people intruding on his land he consulted a police officer who advised him to keep a logbook of everyone he witnessed. The men were later found dead and Casteel was a prime suspect. In 1997 Frank had a mistress, Mrs. Marie Hill. [1] Larry Sneed had taken possession of the logbook in 1988.
Although no physical evidence to support Casteel’s conviction, he was sentenced to life in prison. An appeal was made and eventually given an opportunity to overturn Casteel’s conviction in 2001. [2] The attorneys said there was no hard evidence that clearly identifies Casteel as the murderer. [3] In 2003 Frank Casteel was found guilty again for the triple homicide and returned to prison. [4]
Casteel died in prison in May 2019 at the age of 71. [5]
In 2020, Casteel's son Franklin Trever Casteel authored a book on the subject. [6]
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
Barry Michael George is an English criminal who was found guilty of the murder of English television presenter Jill Dando and whose conviction was overturned on appeal.
The M25 Three were Raphael Rowe, Michael George Davis, and Randolph Egbert Johnson, who were jailed for life at the Old Bailey in March 1990 after being wrongfully convicted of murder and burglary. The name was taken from the location of the crimes, which were committed around the M25, London's orbital motorway, during the early hours of 16 December 1988. The original trial took place between January and February 1990, resulting in all three being convicted of the murder of Peter Hurburgh, causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Timothy Napier and several robberies. Each was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder and given substantial sentences for the other offences. The convictions were overturned in July 2000. All three men have consistently maintained their innocence.
Steven Allan Avery is an American convicted of murder in 2007 from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who had previously been wrongfully convicted in 1985 of sexual assault and attempted murder. After serving 18 years of a 32-year sentence, Avery was exonerated by DNA testing and released in 2003, only to be charged with murder two years later.
The Angola Three are three African-American former prison inmates who were held for decades in solitary confinement while imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary. The latter two were indicted in April 1972 for the killing of a prison corrections officer; they were convicted in January 1974. Wallace and Woodfox served more than 40 years each in solitary, the "longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history".
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Daniel James Morcombe was an Australian boy who was abducted from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland on 7 December 2003 when he was 13 years old. Eight years later, Brett Peter Cowan, a former Sunshine Coast resident, was charged with Morcombe's murder. In the same month, DNA tests confirmed bones in the Glass House Mountains were Morcombe's. On 13 March 2014, Cowan was found guilty of the murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder and indecently dealing with a child and interference with a corpse.
The Jeanine Nicarico murder case was a complex and influential homicide investigation and prosecution in which two men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, both Latinos, were wrongfully convicted of abduction, rape and murder in 1985 in DuPage County, Illinois. They were both sentenced to death. The case was scrutinized during appeals for being weak in evidence.
Kent Leppink was a fisherman who was killed in Hope, Alaska, in May 1996. His former fiancée, Mechele Linehan, and former roommate, John Carlin, were convicted of murdering him in 2007, but the judgments were reversed on appeal. Carlin died in prison in 2008 and Alaska prosecutors ultimately decided against indicting Linehan a second time.
The Nancy Kissel murder case was a highly publicised criminal trial held in the High Court of Hong Kong, where American expatriate Nancy Ann Kissel was convicted of the murder of her husband, 40-year-old investment banker Robert Peter Kissel, in their apartment on 2 November 2003. It was arguably the highest profile criminal case involving an expatriate in Hong Kong's history, and was closely covered in the media.
Rolando Cruz is an American man known for having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, along with co-defendant Alejandro Hernandez, for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County, Illinois. The police had no substantive physical evidence linking the two men to the crime. Their first trial was jointly in 1987, and their statements were used against each other and a third defendant.
Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher was a British student on exchange from the University of Leeds who was murdered at the age of 21 in Perugia, Italy. Kercher was found dead on the floor of her bedroom. By the time the bloodstained fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, an Ivorian migrant, police had charged Kercher's American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The subsequent prosecutions of Knox and Sollecito received international publicity, with forensic experts and jurists taking a critical view of the evidence supporting the initial guilty verdicts.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The 1982 Lake Waco Murders refers to the deaths of three teenagers near Lake Waco in Waco, Texas, in July 1982. The police investigation and criminal trials that followed the murders lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the execution of one man, David Wayne Spence, and life prison sentences for two other men allegedly involved in the crime, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez. A fourth suspect, Muneer Mohammad Deeb, was eventually released after spending several years in prison.
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.
Hae Min Lee was a Korean-American high school student who was last seen alive on January 13, 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland. Her body was found four weeks later in Leakin Park; she had been killed by manual strangulation.
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.
Brendan Ray Dassey is an American convicted murderer from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who at 16 confessed to being a party to first-degree murder, mutilation of a corpse, and second-degree sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison with the earliest possibility of parole in 2048. His videotaped interrogation and confession, which he recanted at trial, substantially contributed to his conviction. Parts were shown, but much was left out, in the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer (2015). The series examined the 2005–2007 investigation, prosecution, and trials of Dassey and his uncle, Steven Avery, both of whom were convicted of murdering the photographer Teresa Halbach on October 31, 2005.
The Skid Row Stabber is an American serial killer, responsible for the murders of 11 people in the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Skid Row, which is notorious for housing a huge number of homeless people, who are regularly subjected to victimization. The criminal's signature weapon was a knife. While a suspect named Bobby Joe Maxwell was arrested, charged, and sentenced for the murders, his conviction was overturned in 2010.