Donald Marshall, Jr. (13 September 1953–6 August 2009) was a Mi'kmaq man who was wrongly convicted of murder.
The case inspired a number of disturbing questions about the fairness of the Canadian justice system, especially given that Marshall was an Aboriginal; as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation put it, "The name Donald Marshall is almost synonymous with 'wrongful conviction' and the fight for native justice in Canada."
The case inspired the book and film Justice Denied. His father, Donald Marshall, Sr., was grand chief of the Mi'kmaq Nation at the time.
On 1994, in Stokes County, Rex Penland was charged in the rape and killing of a Winston-Salem prostitute.
Penland said he was passed out drunk in his pickup when Vernice Alford was stabbed to death, but the physical evidence presented at trial supported testimony by his nephews – twin brothers named Larry and Gary Sapp. They said that Penland raped Alford and had them tie her to a tree. The twins then waited in the truck, they said, and he soon returned with a bloody hunting knife and bragged of “icing” her.
A deputy and an agent with the State Bureau of Investigation testified that a footprint at the scene matched Penland’s snakeskin cowboy boots (*SEE CORRECTION). With the footprint and the knife on their side, not to mention the Sapps’ testimony, prosecutors won a murder conviction and a death sentence.
11 years later, the science is on Penland’s side.
A report by the state crime lab shows that there was no scientific evidence that the footprint matched Penland’s boots. And new DNA evidence shows that the semen collected in the case wasn’t his. As for the blood on his knife, the DNA doesn’t match Alford’s DNA. Instead, the partial DNA profile matches Penland’s, who testified that he cut himself skinning a deer a few days before Alford’s murder.
The new evidence may not prove innocence, but it was enough for a judge to grant Penland a new trial.
The new trial saved the guy from death by lethal injection..
In February 1985, a Hispanic man from Aurora, Illinois named Rolando Cruz and a co-defendant were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, deviant sexual assault and murder of 10-year old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County Circuit Court despite the fact that the police had no physical evidence linking them to the crime. Cruz was released after more than 10 years in custody.
Cruz was not initially a person of interest for the crime until he attempted to claim the $10,000 reward for information on the murder with a fabricated story. There was enormous public and political pressure on the state attorney's office to solve the highly publicized case and the police and prosecutors became convinced of Cruz's guilt. One of the investigating detectives however was convinced of Cruz's innocence and resigned so he could testify for the defense. Later an Assistant Attorney General, Mary Brigid Kenney, also resigned claiming "I was being asked to help execute an innocent man".
In November 1985, another man, Brian Dugan, was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole for two unrelated similar homicides (one a seven year old girl) committed in nearby Kane and LaSalle Counties. At the time of his arrest he had also confessed to the Jeanine Nicarico murder but this information was blocked by prosecutors from Cruz's two retrials. The conviction was overturned in 1989 due to a prosecutorial error; Cruz was retried, and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction and death sentence in February, 1990.
Justice Heiple, writing for the majority, found errors in the trial but dismissed them as harmless in light of the "overwhelming" physical evidence. This decision sparked an understandable public outcry, since even prosecutors had to admit that no physical evidence existed linking Cruz to the crime, much less "overwhelming" physical evidence. In 1992, Assistant Attorney General Mary Brigid Kenney, who was assigned to fight Cruz's appeal, sent a memo to Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris identifying numerous errors in the investigation and trial in Cruz's initial conviction including "perjured testimony" and "fraudulent investigations by local officials". Burris disputed Kenney's contentions, claiming he could not hold his judgement higher than the jury and that it was his job to uphold a jury's decision and Kenney resigned in protest.
