Wrongful execution

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The grave of Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully executed for the murder of his daughter Timothy Evans Grave.JPG
The grave of Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully executed for the murder of his daughter

Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Opponents of capital punishment often cite cases of wrongful execution as arguments, while proponents argue that innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty. [1]

Contents

A variety of individuals are claimed to have been innocent victims of the death penalty. [2] [3] Newly available DNA evidence has allowed the exoneration and release of more than 20 death-row inmates since 1992 in the United States, [4] but DNA evidence is available in only a fraction of capital cases. At least 190 people who were sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated and released since 1973, with official misconduct and perjury/false accusation the leading causes of their wrongful convictions. [5]

Judicial murder is a type of wrongful execution. [6]

Specific examples

Australia

Colin Campbell Ross was hanged in Melbourne in 1922 for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke the previous year in what became known as the Gun Alley Murder. The case was re-examined in the 1990s using modern techniques and Ross was eventually pardoned in 2008, by which time capital punishment in Australia had been abolished in all jurisdictions.

China

Wei Qing'an (Chinese :魏清安, born 1961) was a Chinese citizen who was executed for the rape of Kun Liu, a woman who had disappeared. The execution was carried out on 3 May 1984 by the Intermediate People's Court. In the next month, Tian Yuxiu (田玉修) was arrested and admitted that he had committed the rape. Three years later, Wei was officially declared innocent. [7]

Teng Xingshan (Chinese :滕兴善) was a Chinese citizen who was executed for supposedly having raped, robbed and murdered Shi Xiaorong (石小荣), a woman who had disappeared. An old man found a dismembered body, and incompetent police forensics claimed to have matched the body to the photo of the missing Shi Xiaorong. The execution was carried out on 28 January 1989 by the Huaihua Intermediate People's Court. In 1993, the previously missing woman returned to the village, saying she had been kidnapped and taken to Shandong. The absolute innocence of the wrongfully executed Teng was not admitted until 2006. [8]

Nie Shubin (Chinese :聂树斌, born 1974) was a Chinese citizen who was executed for the rape and murder of Kang Juhua (康菊花), a woman in her thirties. The execution was carried out on 27 April 1995 by the Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court. In 2005, ten years after the execution, Wang Shujin (王书金; Wáng Shūjīn) admitted to the police that he had committed the murder. [9] [10] Nie was declared innocent in 2017 and Wang was executed on 2 February 2021 by lethal injection.

Qoγsiletu or Huugjilt (Mongolian: Qoγsiletu, Chinese : 呼格吉勒图 , born 1977) was an Inner Mongolian who was executed for the rape and murder of a young girl on 10 June 1996. On 5 December 2006, ten years after the execution, Zhao Zhihong (Chinese :赵志红) wrote the Petition of my Death Penalty admitting he had committed the crime. Huugjilt was posthumously exonerated and Zhao Zhihong was sentenced to death in 2015. [11]

Taiwan

Chiang Kuo-ching (Chiang is the family name; Chinese : 江國慶 , born 1975) was a Republic of China Air Force serviceman who was executed by a military tribunal on 13 August 1997 for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. On 28 January 2011, over 13 years after the execution, Hsu Jung-chou (許榮洲), who had a history of sexual abuse, admitted to the prosecutor that he had been responsible for the crime. In September 2011, Chiang was posthumously acquitted by a military court, who found his original confession had been obtained by torture. Ma Ying-jeou, the Republic of China's president, apologised to Chiang's family. [12] Later that year, Hsu was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the murder. [13] However, in 2013, his conviction was overturned by the Taiwan High Court. It was determined that Hsu's confessions were inconsistent with the autopsy reports. In addition, he was intellectually disabled. Hsu had the mind of between that of a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old. and could not write. His initial confession had been written down by a member of the military who refused to testify. The ruling stated that Hsu left a bloody palm print at the scene of the crime, but no other evidence linked him to the crime. [14]

Ireland

Sir Edward Crosbie, 5th Baronet was wrongfully executed in Carlow in 1798. Accused of being a United Irishman, his innocence was later proven.

Maolra Seoighe was executed in Galway in 1882 for the Maamtrasna Murders. Crispin Blunt, Tory Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice, stated that Seoighe was "probably an innocent man". [15] On 4 April 2018 Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, issued a pardon on the advice of the government of Ireland saying "Maolra Seoighe was wrongly convicted of murder and was hanged for a crime that he did not commit." [16] Seoighe had not received a fair trial. Although he could only speak Irish, the case was heard in English without any translation service. He was posthumously pardoned in 2018.

Harry Gleeson was executed in Ireland in April 1941 for the murder of Moll McCarthy in County Tipperary in November 1940. The Gardaí withheld crucial evidence and fabricated other evidence against Gleeson. In 2015, he was posthumously pardoned. [17] [18]

United Kingdom

In 1660, in a variety of events known as the Campden Wonder, an Englishman named William Harrison disappeared after going on a walk, near the village of Charingworth, in Gloucestershire. Some of his clothing was found slashed and bloody on the side of a local road. Investigators interrogated Harrison's servant, John Perry, who eventually confessed that his mother and his brother had killed Harrison for money. Perry, his mother, and his brother were hanged. Two years later, Harrison reappeared, telling a tale that he had been abducted by three horsemen and sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Though his tale was implausible, he indubitably had not been murdered by the Perry family.

In the UK, reviews prompted by the Criminal Cases Review Commission have resulted in one pardon and three exonerations for people that were executed between 1950 and 1953 (when the execution rate in England and Wales averaged 17 per year), with compensation being paid. Timothy Evans was granted a posthumous free pardon in 1966. Mahmood Hussein Mattan was convicted in 1952 and was the last person to be hanged in Cardiff, Wales, but had his conviction quashed in 1998. George Kelly was hanged at Liverpool in 1950, but had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in June 2003. [19] Derek Bentley had his conviction quashed in 1998 with the appeal trial judge, Lord Bingham, noting that the original trial judge, Lord Goddard, had denied the defendant "the fair trial which is the birthright of every British citizen."

Timothy Evans was executed in March 1950 for the murder of his wife and infant daughter. An official inquiry conducted 16 years later determined that it was Evans' fellow tenant, serial killer John Christie, who was responsible for the murders. Christie also admitted to the murder of Evans' wife, following a conviction for murdering five other women and his own wife. Christie, who was himself executed in 1953, may have murdered other women, judging by evidence found in his possession at the time of his arrest, but it was never pursued by the police. Evans was posthumously pardoned in 1966 after the inquiry concluded that Christie had also murdered Evans' daughter. The case was a major factor leading to the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom.

George Kelly was executed in March 1950 for the 1949 murder of the manager of the Cameo Cinema in Liverpool, UK and his assistant during a robbery that went wrong. This case became known as the Cameo Murder. Kelly's conviction was overturned in 2003. Another man, Donald Johnson, had confessed to the crime but the police bungled Johnson's case and had not divulged his confession at Kelly's trial. [20]

Somali-born Mahmood Hussein Mattan was executed in 1952 for the murder of Lily Volpert. In 1998 the Court of Appeal decided that the original case was, in the words of Lord Justice Rose, "demonstrably flawed". The family were awarded £725,000 compensation, to be shared equally among Mattan's wife and three children. The compensation was the first award to a family for a person wrongfully hanged.

Derek Bentley was a learning disabled young man who was executed in 1953. He was convicted of the murder of a police officer during an attempted robbery, despite the fact that his accomplice had fired the gun while Bentley was already under arrest at the time of the shooting. Christopher Craig, the 16-year-old who fired the fatal shot, could not be executed as he was under 18. Craig served 10 years in prison before he was released. [21]

United States

University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross led a team of experts in the law and in statistics that estimated the likely number of unjust convictions. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences determined that at least 4% of people on death row would be legally exonerated if they were kept on death row indefinitely. This statistic would include people who otherwise would've had their death sentences overturned on appeal prior to being exonerated. [22] [23]

In 1736, Andrew, a slave belonging to Richard Bradford, and a married white indentured servant named Elizabeth Williams were convicted of adultery for having consensual sex in Caroline County. Unsatisfied with the verdict, some successfully lobbied for Andrew to be prosecuted for rape. Andrew was convicted of rape, sentenced to death, and executed on June 6, 1736. The incident was later seen as a miscarriage of justice since it was undisputed that the two had engaged in consensual sex. Going forward, the county stopped punishing black men when white women gave birth to mixed race children. However, four white women would be flogged in such cases. [24]

Celia was a slave who was executed in Missouri in 1855 for the murder of her master, whom she killed in self-defense after he tried to rape her. Celia's master had been raping her on a regular basis for years, after he tried to rape her again. The judge denied the defense's jury instruction to acquit based on the sexual assault and denied the jury any ability to acquit on grounds for self-defense or to find Celia justified to ward off her master's sexual advances with force or at all. He also prevented the defense from arguing that Celia had killed her master by accident. Celia was posthumously pardoned in 2024. [25]

We-Chank-Wash-ta-don-pee, or Chaska (died 26 December 1862), [26] was a Native American of the Dakota who was executed in a mass hanging near Mankato, Minnesota, in the wake of the Dakota War of 1862, despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln had commuted his death sentence days earlier. [26]

Chipita Rodriguez was hanged in San Patricio County, Texas in 1863 for murdering a horse trader, and 122 years later, the Texas Legislature passed a resolution exonerating her.

Thomas and Meeks Griffin were executed in South Carolina in 1915 for the murder of a man involved in an interracial affair two years previously. They were posthumously pardoned in 2009. It is thought that they were arrested and charged because they were viewed as wealthy enough to hire competent legal counsel and get an acquittal. [27]

In 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were controversially accused of robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts. Anti-Italianism, anti-immigrant, and anti-Anarchist bias were suspected as having heavily influenced the verdict. As details of the trial and the men's suspected innocence became known, sporadic protests were held in major cities all around the world calling for their release, especially after Portuguese migrant Celestino Madeiros confessed in 1925 to committing the crime absolving them of participation. [28] However, the Supreme Court refused to upset the verdict, and in spite of worldwide protests, Sacco and Vanzetti were eventually executed in 1927. [29] [30] On 23 August 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation vindicating Sacco and Vanzetti, stating that they had been treated unjustly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names". [31] Later analyses have also added doubt to their culpability. [32] [33] [34]

In October 1930, a 16-year-old black teenager named Alexander McClay Williams was accused of murdering Vida Robare, a white matron of his reform school, during an attempted sexual assault. Authorities coerced Williams into confessing to the murder, although he later recanted his confession. Overall, authorities subjected Williams to five interrogations without his parents or an attorney present; he signed three different confessions, the last of which was altered to match the crime scene details and the story that Williams had attempted to sexually assault Robare, as Williams's first confession had not matched the crime scene details or the allegations authorities made against him. [35] [36] At his trial, Williams faced an all-white jury while being represented by his county's first black attorney. After a judge formally sentenced him to death, Williams yelled out that he had been promised that authorities would not pursue the death penalty against him if he confessed. His appellate attorneys unsuccessfully tried to stop his execution by arguing that he was a "psychopathic inferior," and he was executed on 8 June 1931, still at the age of 16, becoming the youngest person executed in Pennsylvania. [37] In 2015, a descendant of his attorney, Samuel Lemon, began researching Williams's case and concluded that the most likely culprit behind Robare's murder was her ex-husband, who had supposedly discovered her body; Robare had obtained a divorce against her ex-husband on the grounds of "extreme cruelty" due to his domestic abuse against her. Lemon posited that Williams's wrongful prosecution stemmed largely from his race and the "racially charged" atmosphere present at the time. [38] In 2022, following a posthumous review of Williams's case, his conviction was overturned, and all charges against him were dismissed, effectively exonerating him. [39]

Joe Arridy as an intellectually disabled white American man executed for rape and murder and posthumously granted a pardon. Arridy was sentenced to death for the murder and rape of a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Pueblo, Colorado. He confessed to murdering the girl and assaulting her sister. Due to the sensational nature of the crime precautions were taken to keep him from being hanged by vigilante justice. His sentence was executed after multiple stays on 6 January 1939, in the Colorado gas chamber in the state penitentiary in Canon City, Colorado. Arridy was the first Colorado prisoner posthumously pardoned in 2011 by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, a former district attorney, after research had shown that Arridy was very likely not in Pueblo when the crime happened and had been coerced into confessing. Among other things, Arridy had an IQ of 46, equal to the mental age of a 6-year-old. He did not understand that he was going to be executed, and played with a toy train that the warden, Roy Best, had given to him as a present. A man named Frank Aguilar had been executed in 1937 in the Colorado gas chamber for the same crime for which Arridy ended up also being executed. Arridy's posthumous pardon in 2011 was the first such pardon in Colorado history. A press release from the governor's office stated, "[A]n overwhelming body of evidence indicates the 23-year-old Arridy was innocent, including false and coerced confessions, the likelihood that Arridy was not in Pueblo at the time of the killing, and an admission of guilt by someone else." The governor also pointed to Arridy's intellectual disabilities. The governor said, "Granting a posthumous pardon is an extraordinary remedy. But the tragic conviction of Mr. Arridy and his subsequent execution on 6 Jan. 1939, merit such relief based on the great likelihood that Mr. Arridy was, in fact, innocent of the crime for which he was executed, and his severe mental disability at the time of his trial and execution."

George Stinney, a 14-year old African-American boy, was electrocuted in South Carolina on 16 June 1944 for the murder of Betty June Binnicker, age 11, as well as Mary Emma Thames, age 8. The arrest occurred on 23 March 1944 in Alcolu, inside of Clarendon County, South Carolina. Supposedly, the two girls rode their bikes past Stinney's house where they asked him and his sister about a certain type of flower; after this encounter, the girls went missing and were found dead in a ditch the following morning. After an hour of interrogation by the officers, a deputy stated that Stinney confessed to the murder. He was the youngest person executed in the United States. More than 70 years later, a judge threw out the conviction, calling it a "great injustice." [40]

Carlos DeLuna was executed in Texas in December 1989 for stabbing a gas station clerk to death. Subsequent investigations cast strong doubt upon DeLuna's guilt for the murder of which he had been convicted. [41] [42] His execution came about six years after the crime was committed. DeLuna was found blocks away from the crime scene with $149 in his pocket. A wrongful eyewitness testimony and DeLuna's previous criminal record were used against him. [43] Carlos Hernandez, who many believe to be the true killer, was a repeat violent offender who had a history of assaulting women with knives, and was said to have looked very similar to Carlos DeLuna. Hernandez was reported to have bragged about the killing of Wanda Lopez, the gas station clerk. In 1999, Hernandez was imprisoned for attacking his neighbor with a knife. [44] At the same time, DeLuna admitted to being present for the murder, but refused to identify by name the man whom he said was the actual killer, frustrating his own two lawyers. Both believe that he was an accomplice to the murder. [45] The jury sentenced him to death after learning that he had a prior conviction for attempted rape and had attempted to rape another woman just days after his release from prison. [46]

Cameron Todd Willingham of Texas was convicted and executed for the death of his three children who died in a house fire. The prosecution charged that the fire was caused by arson. He has not been posthumously exonerated, but the case has gained widespread attention as a possible case of wrongful execution. A number of arson experts have decried the results of the original investigation as faulty. In June 2009, five years after Willingham's execution, the State of Texas ordered a re-examination of the case. Dr. Craig Beyler found "a finding of arson could not be sustained". Beyler said that key testimony from a fire marshal at Willingham's trial was "hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics". [47] [48] The Texas Forensic Science Commission was scheduled to discuss the report by Beyler at a meeting on 2 October 2009, but two days before the meeting Texas Governor Rick Perry replaced the chair of the commission and two other members. The new chair canceled the meeting, sparking accusations that Perry was interfering with the investigation and using it for his own political advantage. [49] [50] In 2010, a four-person panel of the Texas Forensic Science Commission acknowledged that state and local arson investigators used "flawed science" in determining the blaze had been deliberately set. [51]

In 2015, the Justice Department and the FBI formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an FBI forensic squad overstated forensic hair matches for two decades before the year 2000. Of the 28 forensic examiners testifying to hair matches in a total of 268 trials reviewed, 26 overstated the evidence of forensic hair matches and 95% of the overstatements favored the prosecution. Defendants were sentenced to death in 32 of those 268 cases. [52] [53]

Russia

Aleksandr Kravchenko was executed in 1983 for the 1978 murder of 9-year-old Yelena Zakotnova in Shakhty, a coal-mining town near Rostov-on-Don. Kravchenko had previously served time in prison for the brutal rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl when he was 17, but witnesses said he was not at the scene of Zakotnova's murder at the time. Under police pressure the witnesses altered their statements and Kravchenko was executed. Years later Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer nicknamed "the Red Ripper" and "the Butcher of Rostov", was convicted with Zakotnova murder, among others, and sentenced to death. Prior to his execution in 1994, however, Chikatilo's conviction for Zakotnova's murder was overturned by the Supreme Court of Russia. It is now unclear who committed the murder. [54] [55]

Exonerations and pardons

Kirk Bloodsworth was the first American to be freed from death row as a result of exoneration by DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was a Marine before he became a waterman on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. At the age of 22, he was wrongly convicted of the murder of a nine-year-old girl; she had been sexually assaulted, strangled, and beaten with a rock. An anonymous call to the police claimed that the witness had seen Bloodsworth with the girl that day, and he matched up with the description from the police sketch. Five witnesses claiming that they saw Bloodsworth with the victim, as well as a statement in his testimony where he claimed that he had "done something terrible that day" that would affect his relationship with his wife, did not help his case. No physical evidence connected Bloodsworth to the crime, but he was still convicted of rape and murder which led to him receiving a death sentence. In 1992, DNA from the crime scene was tested against Bloodsworth's and found that he could not have been the killer. After serving nine years in prison, he was released in June 1993. [56]

Ray Krone is the 100th American to have been sentenced to death and then later exonerated. Krone was convicted of the murder of Kim Ancona, thirty-six year old victim in Phoenix, Arizona. Ancona had been found nude, fatally stabbed. The physical evidence that the police had to rely on was bite marks on Ancona's breasts and neck. After Ancona had told a friend that Krone, a regular customer, was going to help her close the bar the previous night, the police brought him in to make a Styrofoam impression of his teeth. After comparing the teeth marks, Krone was arrested for the murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault of Ancona on 31 December 1991. At the trial in 1992, Krone pled innocence, but the teeth mark comparison led the jury to find him guilty and he was sentenced to death as well as a consecutive twenty-one year term of imprisonment. [57] Krone's family also believed that he was innocent, which led them to spend over $300,000 in order to fight for his freedom. [58]

The Death Penalty Information Center has identified at least 190 former death-row prisoners in the United States who have been exonerated since 1973. [59] DPIC reported in February 2021 that exonerated death-row prisoners had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 29 different states and in 118 different counties. The leading causes of these wrongful capital convictions were official misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government officials and perjury or false accusation. Underscoring the often intentional nature of wrongful capital convictions, more than half of all exonerations involved both official misconduct and perjury or false accusation, and at least one or the other was present in nearly 83% of the cases. [60]

See also

References

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  2. ↑ Kreuter, William. "The Innocent Executed". Justice Denied, the Magazine for the Wrongly Convicted.
  3. ↑ Keys, Karl (2001). "Thirty Years of Executions with Reasonable Doubts: A Brief Analysis of Some Modern Executions". Capital Defense Weekly. Archived from the original on 4 August 2007.
  4. ↑ "DNA Exoneree Case Profiles". innocenceproject.org. Archived from the original on 18 December 2013. Retrieved 7 August 2014.
  5. ↑ "DPIC Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic". Death Penalty Information Center.
  6. ↑ Colloquium: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty. University of Tennessee College of Law. 2009. pp. 617–619.
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  25. ↑ Johnson, Melanie (15 February 2025). "Celia's Story: Missouri teen vindicated 175 years later; pardoned for slave owner's murder thanks to family's fight for justice". KMOV. Retrieved 17 May 2025.
  26. 1 2 Elder, Robert (13 December 2010). "Execution 155 Years Ago Spurs Calls for Pardon". The New York Times . Retrieved 19 August 2022.
  27. ↑ "Tom Joyner gets justice for electrocuted kin, 94 years later". CNN. 15 October 2009.
  28. ↑ Watson, 257-60; Tropp reproduces the original note Medeiros passed to Sacco in prison, Tropp, 34; on Medeiros's early life, see Russell, Case Resolved, 127–8
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  30. ↑ Eli Bortman, Sacco & Vanzetti. Boston: Commonwealth Editions, 2005.
  31. ↑ "Report to the Governor in the Matter of Sacco and Vanzetti," 13 July 1977, in Upton Sinclair, Boston: A Documentary Novel (Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, Inc., 1978), 757–90, quote 757
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  36. ↑ "Negro Changes Story of Murdering Matron at Glen Mills School". York Daily Record . 10 October 1931. p. 11. Archived from the original on 1 August 2022. Retrieved 1 August 2022– via Newspapers.com.
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  38. ↑ Serbin, Susan L. (23 July 2017). "Media author Dr. Sam Lemon recounts Alexander McClay Williams case". Daily Local News. Archived from the original on 20 October 2022. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
  39. ↑ "Pennsylvania Teen Exonerated 91 Years After Sham Trial and Execution on Racially Motivated Charges that He Had Murdered a White Woman". Death Penalty Information Center. 21 June 2022. Archived from the original on 21 June 2022. Retrieved 23 June 2022.
  40. ↑ Jeffrey Collins, "70 years later, judge rules 14-year-old boy was wrongly executed", "The Christian Science Monitor", 17 December 2014.
  41. ↑ Andrew Cohen, "Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man", The Atlantic Monthly , 14 May 2012.
  42. ↑ Pilkington, Ed (15 May 2012) The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death The Guardian , Retrieved 15 May 2012
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  44. ↑ "The Carlos DeLuna case: Definitive proof that Texas executed an innocent man?". 16 May 2012. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  45. ↑ Michael Graczyk (17 May 2012). "Report questioning Tex. execution doesn't sway lawyers". Associated Press.
  46. ↑ Liebman, James; et al. (May 2012). Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution. Columbia Human Rights Law Review. p. 806. Archived from the original on 24 June 2012. Retrieved 5 June 2012.
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  48. ↑ Beyler, Craig L. (17 August 2009). "Analysis of the Fire Investigation Methods and Procedures Used in the Criminal Arson Cases Against Ernest Ray Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham". Hughes Associates, Inc. Archived from the original on 8 February 2010. Retrieved 1 September 2009.
  49. ↑ "CNN's Anderson Cooper 360: "Is Texas Governor Rick Perry Trying to Cover Up Execution of Innocent Man on His Watch"". "Texas Moratorium Network" (camerontoddwillingham.com). 3 October 2009. Archived from the original on 9 October 2011.
  50. ↑ Smith, Matt (2 October 2009). "Shake-up in Texas execution probe draws criticism, questions". CNN. Archived from the original on 23 July 2014. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  51. ↑ Turner, Allan (24 July 2010). "Flawed science" helped lead to Texas man's execution, but inquiry finds no negligence in probe that led to man's execution". Houston Chronicle. Archived from the original on 25 July 2010. Retrieved 8 August 2010.
  52. ↑ Hsu, Spencer (18 April 2015). "FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000". The Washington Post .
  53. ↑ "Report: DOJ, FBI acknowledge flawed testimony from unit". The Big Story. Associated Press. 18 April 2015.
  54. ↑ Conradi, Peter (1991). The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia's Most Brutal Serial Killer. True Crime. pp. 43–44. ISBN   978-0863696183.
  55. ↑ "Определение Верховного Суда по делу Чикатило — Викитека". ru.wikisource.org (in Russian). Retrieved 27 January 2026.
  56. ↑ "Innocence Project: The Cases – Kirk Bloodsworth". Innocence Project. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  57. ↑ "Ray Krone – Innocence Project". Innocence Project. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  58. ↑ Sherrer, Hans. "Twice Wrongly Convicted of Murder – Ray Krone Is Set Free After 10 Years". Justice Denied Magazine. 2 (9). Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  59. ↑ Death Penalty Information Center, Innocence, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence, last visited 26 November 2022.
  60. ↑ Death Penalty Information Center, DPIC Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/dpic-reports/dpic-special-reports/dpic-special-report-the-innocence-epidemic, 18 February 2021.
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