San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
Anthony Porter was a Chicago resident known for having been exonerated in 1999 of the murder in 1982 of two teenagers on the South Side of the city. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983, and served 17 years on death row. He was exonerated following introduction of new evidence by Northwestern University professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism as part of their investigation for the school's Innocence Project. Porter's appeals had been repeatedly rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, and he was once 50 hours away from execution.
Jesse Joseph Tafero was convicted of murder and executed via electric chair in the U.S. state of Florida for the murders of 39-year-old Florida Highway Patrol officer Phillip A. Black and 39-year-old Ontario Provincial Police Corporal Donald Irwin, a visiting Canadian constable and friend of Black. The officers were killed during a traffic stop where Tafero, his wife Sunny Jacobs and their children were passengers. Tafero's execution was botched; his head burst into flames during the execution by electric chair. After Tafero's execution, the driver, Walter Rhodes, confessed to shooting the officers, but later retracted his testimony.
Mark Goudeau is an American serial killer, kidnapper, thief and rapist. Goudeau terrorized victims in the Phoenix metro area between August 2005 and June 2006; coincidentally, Goudeau was active at the same time as two other Phoenix serial killers, jointly known as the "Serial Shooters.”
Joseph Carl Shaw was an American convicted murderer who was the first person to be executed by the state of South Carolina after the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment by the states in 1976. Shaw was executed for the 1977 murders of three people in Richland County, South Carolina. One of his accomplices, James Terry Roach, was also sentenced to death, and was executed in 1986.
Gary Tyler, from St. Rose, Louisiana, is an African-American man who is a former prisoner at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, Louisiana. He was convicted of the October 7, 1974 shooting death of a white 13-year-old boy and the wounding of another, on a day of violent protests by whites against black students at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. He was tried as an adult and convicted of first-degree murder at age 17 by an all-white jury; he received the mandatory death sentence for that crime, according to state law. When he entered Louisiana State Prison (Angola), he was the youngest person on death row.
The Wichita Massacre, also known as the Wichita Horror, was a week-long violent crime spree perpetrated by brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr, in the city of Wichita, Kansas, between December 8 and 15, 2000. Five people were killed, and two people, a man and a woman, were severely wounded. The brothers were arrested and convicted of multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, robbery, and rape. They were both sentenced to death in October 2002. Their vicious crimes created panic in the Wichita area resulting in an increase in the sales of guns, locks, and home security systems.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., aged 23, were from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked. The couple were taken to a rental house. Both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered. Four males and one female were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, Lemaricus Devall Davidson, George Geovonni Thomas, and Vanessa Lynn Coleman on counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder. Also in 2007, Eric DeWayne Boyd was indicted by a federal grand jury of being an accessory to a carjacking, resulting in serious bodily injury to another person and misprision of a felony. In 2018, Boyd was indicted on state-level charges of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder.
Joseph H. Burrows was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of farmer William E. Dulan at his home in Iroquois County, Illinois, in 1988. After his conviction and sentence to death in 1989, Burrows was held for nearly five years on death row.
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.
Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women (KCIW) is a prison located in unincorporated Shelby County, Kentucky, near Pewee Valley, Kentucky, operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. Male and female inmates prior to 1937 had been housed at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Frankfort
Tyrone Delano Gilliam Jr. was an American convicted murderer executed by the state of Maryland in 1998. Gilliam was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of 21-year-old Christine J. Doerfler on December 2, 1988.
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.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Kentucky.
The Ford Heights Four were formerly imprisoned convicts, who were falsely accused and convicted of the double murder of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal in Ford Heights, Illinois, and later exonerated. Jimerson and Williams were sentenced to death, Adams to 75 years in prison and Rainge to life. Following the murder in 1978, the four spent almost two decades in prison before being released in 1996. This miscarriage of justice was due to false forensic testimony, coercion of a prosecution witness, perjury by another witness who had an incentive to lie, and prosecution and police misconduct. The DNA evidence uncovered in the investigation to clear their names eventually led to the arrest and conviction of the real killers.
Beoria Abraham Simmons II is an American serial killer and kidnapper who murdered two women and a teenage girl in Jefferson County, Kentucky, between 1981 and 1983. He was arrested after failing to kidnap a fourth victim, who later reported him to police. By the time of his capture, another man had been wrongfully imprisoned for one of his crimes.
James Ray Cable was an American serial killer. Originally convicted in 1990 for kidnapping and torturing a teenage girl, he was later linked via DNA to the murders of three women in across Kentucky between 1982 and 1989. He was subsequently charged with these crimes, but died while awaiting trial in 2013.
