Patricia Campbell Hearst is an American author and actress, and a granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. She first became known for the events following her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was found and arrested 19 months after being abducted, by which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with members of the group. She was held in custody, and there was speculation before trial that her family's resources would enable her to avoid time in prison.
Marc Paul Alain Dutroux is a Belgian convicted serial killer, rapist, and child molester.
The Central Park jogger case was a criminal case in the United States over the aggravated assault and rape of a white woman in Manhattan's Central Park on April 19, 1989, occurring during a string of other attacks in the park the same night. Five black and Latino youths were convicted of assaulting the woman, and served sentences ranging from six to twelve years. All later had their charges vacated after a prison inmate confessed to the crime.
José Padilla, also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir or Muhajir Abdullah, is a United States citizen who was convicted in a federal court of aiding terrorists.
Carlie's Law was a bill introduced in the United States Congress by Representative Katherine Harris (R-FL), with the support of Nick Lampson (D-TX) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), in response to the kidnapping, rape and murder of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia by Joseph P. Smith in Florida in February 2004. Smith was on probation at the time of Brucia's murder, having been released from state prison thirteen months prior.
Karla Leanne Homolka, also known as Leanne Teale, is a Canadian serial killer and rapist who, with her first husband Paul Bernardo, raped and killed at least three minors between 1990 and 1992. Homolka attracted worldwide media attention when she was convicted of manslaughter following a plea bargain to serve only 12 years in the rape-murders of two Ontario teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, as well as the rape and death of her sister Tammy. Homolka and Bernardo were arrested in 1993. Bernardo was convicted of the Mahaffy-French murders and received life imprisonment and a dangerous offender designation, the full maximum sentence allowed in Canada.
In the Pitcairn sexual assault trial of 2004 seven men living on Pitcairn Island faced 55 charges relating to sexual offences against children and young people. The accused represented a third of the island's male population and included Steve Christian, the mayor. On 24 October, all but one of the defendants were found guilty on at least some of the charges. Another six men living abroad, including Shawn Christian, who later served as mayor of Pitcairn, were tried on 41 charges in a separate trial in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2005.
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.
Gerald Phillip Garson was a New York Supreme Court Justice who heard matrimonial divorce and child custody cases in Brooklyn. He was convicted in 2007 of accepting bribes to manipulate the outcomes of divorce proceedings. Garson was imprisoned from June 2007 until December 2009.
Richard Alexander is an Indiana man wrongfully convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence. On September 17, 2020 he was charged with the murder of his ex-girlfriend.
Kevin Coe is an American convicted rapist from Spokane, Washington, often referred to in the news media as the South Hill Rapist. As of May 2008, Coe is still a suspect in dozens of rapes, the number of which is unusually large; his convictions received an unusual amount of attention from appeals courts. Coe's mother Ruth was convicted for hiring a hitman against the judge and the prosecutor at her son's trial following his conviction. The bizarre relationship between Coe and his mother became the subject of a nonfiction book, Son: A Psychopath and his Victims, by the crime author Jack Olsen.
On November 2, 2002, U.S. Marine Corps Major Michael Brown attempted an indecent assault on a Filipina bartender in Okinawa, Japan. The bartender accused Brown of attempting to rape her and of throwing her cell phone into a nearby river; Brown denied the rape charges. The victim later recanted and attempted to withdraw the accusation, though prosecutors presented evidence that she had received a cash payment just before doing so.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Suryanelli rape case refers to a case of kidnapping and subsequent rape of a 16-year-old school girl from Suryanelli, Kerala, India, in 1996. The girl was allegedly lured with the promise of marriage on 16 January 1996 and kidnapped. She was allegedly raped by 37 of the 42 accused persons, over a period of 40 days. The remaining had abetted the crime. After PJ Kurien, the then Union Minister and later Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman belonging to UDF led by Congress party, was named, the issue was politicised, due to a then upcoming general election. Several women's rights activists like K. Ajitha and Suja Susan George, and women's organisations, like NFIW and Anweshi, have taken an interest in the case.
Kym Loren Worthy is the current prosecutor of Wayne County, Michigan, home to the city of Detroit. She is the first African-American woman to serve as a county prosecutor in Michigan. She became internationally recognized for prosecuting then Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at the beginning of March 2008.
John Wayne Bobbitt and Lorena Bobbitt were an American couple married on June 18, 1989, whose relationship received international media coverage in 1993 when, after claims of years of rape and abuse by her husband, Lorena cut off his penis with a knife while he was asleep in bed. The penis was subsequently surgically reattached. John Wayne Bobbitt was acquitted on the rape charge.
People v. Jovanovic, 263 A.D.2d 182, 700 N.Y.S.2d 156, was a highly publicized criminal case in New York. In 1996, Oliver Jovanovic was accused of sadomasochistic torture of a woman, later identified as Jamie Rzucek, whom he had met shortly before on the Internet. He was convicted in 1998 and the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1999 because parts of email messages between the two had been improperly excluded as evidence at trial. Rzucek declined to testify during the retrial in 2001 and the case was dropped.
Marvin Charles Gabrion is an American murderer and rapist convicted of the 1997 kidnapping and murder of 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman, of Cedar Springs, Michigan. Timmerman and her 11-month-old daughter, Shannon, disappeared two days before Gabrion was set to stand trial on rape charges filed by Rachel the previous summer. Rachel's body was found in Oxford Lake, weighted down by cinder blocks. Shannon remains missing, but is presumed deceased. Gabrion is also the prime suspect in the disappearances and murders of several other people, including a witness who was set to testify against him in the trial for rape, his handyman, another potential witness and family friend and an unknown man. The bodies of these people, who were witnesses to his case, are yet to be found, but various items belonging to them were recovered from his home.
Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story is a documentary film about Cyntoia Brown, a 16-year old sentenced to 51 years for the murder of Johnny Allen. Brown had been forced into prostitution and involuntarily sex trafficked as a minor by Garion "Kut-Throat” McGlothen. Brown claimed she killed Allen in self-defense, adding she feared she was likely to be murdered by him. Prosecutors argued the physical evidence present at the crime scene suggested Allen was asleep at the time of the murder.
Operation Mississippi Hustle was a federal investigation initiated in 2014 by the United States Attorney and prosecuted in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. It examined the relationship between officials of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and various for-profit prison contractors and subcontractors, who have provided services to the five private prisons in the state. One, Walnut Grove, closed in September 2016 but has since reopened.
