Lana Jean Clarkson was an American actress and fashion model. During the 1980s, she rose to prominence in several sword-and-sorcery films. In 2003, record producer Phil Spector shot and killed Clarkson inside his home; he was charged with second-degree murder and convicted in 2009.
Laci Denise Peterson was an American woman murdered by her husband, Scott Lee Peterson, while eight months pregnant with their first child. Laci disappeared on December 24, 2002, from the couple's home in Modesto, California, after which Scott reported her missing. The remains of her and her unborn son, whom the couple had planned to name Conner, were discovered in April 2003 on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Subsequently, Scott was arrested and charged with two counts of murder. In November 2004, he was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Laci and the second-degree murder of the infant.
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.
Leslie Louise Van Houten is an American convicted murderer and former member of the Manson Family. During her time with Manson's group, she was known by aliases such as Louella Alexandria, Leslie Marie Sankston, Linda Sue Owens and Lulu.
Barbara Elaine "Bonnie"WoodGraham was an American criminal convicted of murder. She was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison on the same day as two convicted accomplices, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins, all of whom were involved in a robbery that led to the murder of an elderly widow. Nicknamed "Bloody Babs" by the press, Graham was the third woman in California to be executed by gas.
California State Prison, Corcoran (COR) is a male-only state prison located in the city of Corcoran, in Kings County, California. It is also known as Corcoran State Prison, CSP-C, CSP-COR, CSP-Corcoran, and Corcoran I. The facility is just north of the newer California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, Corcoran.
The Bridgewater Four are four men who were tried and found guilty of killing 13-year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, who was shot in the head at close range near Stourbridge, England, in 1978. In February 1997, after almost two decades of imprisonment, their convictions were overturned and the three surviving defendants were released; the fourth defendant had died in prison two years into his sentence. Bridgewater's murder remains unsolved.
Sarah Evelyn Isobel Payne was the victim of a high-profile abduction and murder in West Sussex, England in July 2000.
The Chicago Outfit is an Italian-American organized crime syndicate or crime family based in Chicago, Illinois, which originated in the city's South Side in 1910. It is part of the larger Italian-American Mafia.
Ward Francis Weaver III is an American convicted murderer. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for sexual assault, rape, attempted murder, and the murders of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis in Oregon City, Oregon.
Kenneth Eugene Parnell was an American convicted sex offender, child rapist, and kidnapper infamously known for committing the abductions of 7-year-old Steven Stayner in Merced, California, in 1972 and 5-year-old Timothy White in Ukiah, California, in 1980. He was convicted in 2004 for attempting to purchase a child for sex and died in prison.
Joseph Edward Duncan III was an American convicted serial killer and child molester who was on death row in federal prison following the 2005 kidnappings and murders of members of the Groene family of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He was also serving 11 consecutive sentences of life without parole for the 1997 murder of Anthony Martinez of Beaumont, California. Additionally, Duncan confessed to — but had not been charged with — the 1996 murder of two girls, Sammiejo White and Carmen Cubias, in Seattle, Washington. At the time of the attack on the Groene family, Duncan was on the run from a child molestation charge in Minnesota.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Glen Edward Rogers, also known as "The Cross Country Killer" or "The Casanova Killer", is an American serial killer. He was convicted of two murders and is a suspect in numerous others throughout the United States. According to one cable-TV documentary, he claims that he was responsible for the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, but there is no basis for that claim and O. J. Simpson was found responsible for the murders in a 1997 civil trial. Rogers was featured on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list after a crime spree that began on September 28, 1995, with Rogers' first authoritatively established murder.
Travis Victor Alexander was an American salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias, in his house in Mesa, Arizona while in the shower. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on April 13, 2015.
Linda Andersen was the victim of premeditated murder by her two teenage daughters on January 18, 2003, in Mississauga, Ontario. Since both daughters were under the age of 18 at the time of the murder, their identities are protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, a Canadian law. The names Linda Andersen, as well as sisters Sandra and Elizabeth (Beth) Andersen, are aliases created by journalist Bob Mitchell, in an effort to protect the girl's identities in the book he wrote about their mother's murder. The book is The Class Project: How to Kill a Mother: The True Story of Canada's Infamous Bathtub Girls. The sisters are also commonly referred to as the "Bathtub Girls" due to their drowning their mother in a bathtub.
Alfredo Rolando Prieto was a Salvadoran-American serial killer. After being initially convicted for a single murder, he would later be connected to eight other murders committed in Virginia and California between May 1988 and September 1990 via DNA profiling. Sentenced to death in both states, Prieto was executed by lethal injection in Virginia in 2015.
Jimmy Lee Smith, also known as Youngblood, was an American criminal who assisted Gregory Powell with the kidnapping of Los Angeles Police Department officers Ian Campbell and Karl Francis Hettinger on the night of March 9, 1963. There, Smith and Powell took Campbell and Hettinger to an onion field near Bakersfield, California, where Campbell was fatally shot. Infamously known as one of the "Onion Field" killers, Smith's story was depicted in Joseph Wambaugh's 1973 nonfiction book The Onion Field. The book was adapted into a 1979 feature film of the same name in which Smith was portrayed by Franklyn Seales.
