FairPlay | Challenge Wrongful Convictions with Imran Siddiqui of Justice News

This was the first message I received on Twitter from Michael Smith of Kentucky on Jan 3 2022.

Quote "Lexington Kentucky fraud on the court case number 3:08-cr-31(Jmh) denied due process malicious prosecution fraud-The federal grand jury declined to indict YET WE had a five 5 week trial and spent nine years in federal prison wrongful conviction miscarriage of justice malicious fraud by Kentucky bar members"

Then on April 30th I received sequences of Tweets containing messages like these.

Quote "All was malicious prosecution, malicious fraud on court - malicious civil rights violation. malicious injustice. -Malicious politics by political leaders"

Quote "I have typed on Twitter 7000 times wrong full conviction miscarriage of justice actual innocent no crime no indictment malicious prosecution fraud-Fraud on the court case number 3:08-Cr-31(Jmh). Lexington Kentucky-malicious abusing of political power on a East Kentucky family"

On May 10 2022, after almost 4 months, which was wrong, but this was my response to Michael.

Quote "Good morning. Typing it a million times won't do anything until you stand up and raise your voice and both your fists."

I wanted to add more to the fists part, like where to take them, because the deeper I dug into his case the more nauseating it got. It is a case unlike what you see or hear about everyday. The case has never had an actual indictment, or if anyone has really seen one, and yet Michael spent over a decade in Prison for something he maintains he did not do. In fact they put him in prison, just to put him in prison, even they don't really know why they put him in prison.

On the same day, May 10 2022, Michal sent a few more messages saying "it's a 1 in a 10 million case".

Continue reading on The JBlog on JusticeNews.net

June 1, 2022 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News | 

Can you be coerced to allege criminal sexual assault on your partner? And who then is the actual victim?

Like thousands of other young black men wrongfully incarcerated in the United States of America, there is another young and articulate man by the name of Omar Muhammad pulling a 26 year sentence in Minnesota for an alleged sexual assault that he maintains he did not commit. He says his girlfriend, C.M., who had a consensual relationship with him, was coerced by her co-workers, her parents and the police, to set up a trap for him. According to Omar, this is what happens when a 20 year old black man in Hugo Ohio falls in love with a 40 year old white woman, both madly in love.

After leaving Chicago, Omar moved to Ohio looking for work and wanting to make something out of his life. He found a job at a local grocery store and there he met C.M. Both fell in love and soon moved in together. Omar says, nobody liked that and the stares were obvious.

People accused Omar of using an older woman by taking advantage of her but there is no record of C.M accusing Omar of abuse, let alone, an assault. In fact there are letters and messages, confirming C.M’s love for Omar.

Continue reading on The JBlog -

https://www.justicenews.net/thejblog

| Imran Siddiqui is the managing editor at Justice News and the author of The JBlog.

Listen to Imran's podcast FairPlay Challenging Wrongful Convictions on J107 Justice Radio

When The Tsunami of Justice Comes. The Unjust Are Mowed Down and Destroyed. April 30, 2022 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News | 

I have always felt that audio does not lie, audio is naked, no matter how hard you try to dress it up, you can't, you can always catch a person's true character in their audio, the sound, the spoken voice will say it all.

This is one of those episodes where I don't have to say much. I chose to do audio so I can show people the reality of what we can really become, as human beings - and mostly we are worse than animals.

A clear example of what I'm writing about is not just in the case of John Merritt a "Florida Shame" or any other external reference link that I will give you to source. Instead I will give you the pure audio, in it's closest raw form, and because you are reading this, then you do have a brain cell and you can think, listen and understand what's being said and then make up your own mind.

This is an audio of John Merritt's parole hearing which was a public hearing that took place on April 27 2022 at the Florida Commission on Offender Review in Tallahassee, Florida. Merritt's Private Investigator Dennis Forrester of the Beacon Investigative Solutions was there along with John's attorney Gray Thomas, John's sister Darlene Roy and myself. What we heard at the end was absurd and shocking to the senses. This is what you get after 36 years of wrongful conviction.

Continue reading on the JBlog -

| Imran Siddiqui is the managing editor at Justice News and the author of the JBlog.

Listen to Imran's podcast FairPlay Challenging Wrongful Convictions on J107 Justice Radio

April 24, 2022 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News | Can the State of Michigan Return 25 Years Stolen From a Man's Life? - Do the Clown Parties in D.C. Need a Third Party To Wake Them Up -

After spending over 2 decades in a Michigan state prison for selling marijuana to an informant in 1994, Michael Thompson is thankful to God that he was saved from life in prison.

Michael was granted clemency in 2021 by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, he wouldn't have been eligible for parole until 2038, he is over 70 - another possible death by incarceration - just for selling some weed, in a state that legalized recreational marijuana in 2018.

So why now and how? How did it work out for Michael - Well, this is how it looks like when public pressure becomes something so big that the state can't ignore it anymore.

Continue reading on The JBlog - Justice News

March 21, 2022 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News |

If you give a ride to some guys you kinda know, and they go and shoot someone else, will you be held responsible for the shooting?

False or mistaken eyewitness testimony is something that is loved by the U.S. In-Justice System. They love it so much that it makes up almost 70% of the more than 375 wrongful convictions in the United States that were overturned by post-conviction DNA evidence, according to some reports.

But do you need reports, when day after day, year after year, you yourself watch these cases unfold right in front of your own eyes? Would I be enough of a witness for you, who witnesses on a daily basis, the negative and disastrous effects of these, False Eyewitness Accounts devastating people's lives forever?

The case of Kemen Taylor is a perfect example of such False Eyewitness Testimony that is destroying the core justice values of America while decimating the lives of real human beings and their families along the way. Continue reading on The JBlog at www.JusticeNews.Net.

February 11 2022 | Imran Siddiqui |Justice News |

When the woman you admire becomes the mother of your child, it’s just a very surreal moment.

Why would anyone want to throw all that away to oblivion? And just for a couple of hundred bucks?

If you are insane then I can understand it, but if you're ready to cut a check for one year of advance child support then you wouldn't want to brutally kill your child’s mother for the sake of a few hundred bucks in child support, even if it's in two months arrears, because of the red tape, not because you didn't have the money to pay, especially when you were no where near that crime scene with zero motives to kill anyone.

End result -

A "Harmless Error "of the State, but a "Lifelong Damage to the Innocent".

And no one really knows why.

In United States law, A Harmless Error is a ruling by a trial judge that, although mistaken, does not meet the burden for a losing party to reverse the original decision of the trier of fact on appeal, or to warrant a new trial.

In easy language. If you end up in prison due to the mistake or negligence of others, chances are you will never get out alive. 

Continue reading at The JBlog

Imran Siddiqui is the managing editor at Justice News and the author of the JBlog.

Email - imran@jnews.network or Catch his podcast FairPlay on j107 Justice Radio

January 16 2022 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News |

Mahdi Ali did not grow up like a so-called typical kid, who bikes, goes to school, has fun with friends hanging out or just playing video games, nor did he go to college, he did get his GED but not in the way you might think. Because for the past 11 years, he’s been figuring out how to grow up and survive in different prisons across the state of Minnesota. He had to grow up fast. He had no choice.

Mahdi Ali was convicted as a teenager, for triple murders in Minneapolis that occurred on the night of January 6 in 2010, Murders that he claims he did not commit.

Mahdi says despite his numerous efforts to reach out to Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison and his office, including the conviction review unit, no body has responded to his requests so far even when the facts are absolutely clear.

Who is telling the truth? Read more on The JBlog or listen to FairPlay on Justice News - Where Justice Has No Color.

JusticeForMahdiAli.Com 

| Imran Siddiqui is the managing editor at Justice News and the author of The JBlog.

Email - imran@jnews.network or Catch his podcast FairPlay on j107 Justice Radio

FairPlay is brought to you by Justice News Warrior Patrons and Justice News Super Patrons

January 10 2022 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News |

If you are reading this while married, and if you have a spouse, a husband or a wife, and they are next to you, then immediately thank God.

Because things can turn around for worse, any second, and all that you are taking for granted everyday, could be gone in the blink of an eye.

I thank God for all that and more -

Half of Americans have family members who are incarcerated. And that is from the data in 2018.

Probably half of the incarcerated are innocent. And there is no real clear data on this. No one has it.

What about those who are married and would do anything to be together but just cannot. Like the women who visit their innocent husbands incarcerated in prisons across America. They go through a lot of trouble, and embarrassing searches just to be able to meet and hug and see each other and spend some time together, until it's time to go. And then you turn around to have that one last look, holding on to that last hug and the beautiful smell that it left in your mind and your memories.

Irreplaceable!.

Continue on The JBlog - FairPlay.

| Imran Siddiqui is the managing editor at Justice News and the author of the JBlog.

Email - imran@jnews.network or Catch his podcast FairPlay on  j107 Justice Radio

December 29 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News

Bruce Smith has spent over 20 years in a Florida state prison as part of his conviction of Life without parole plus 15 years for allegedly killing a 4 year old boy Cameron in 2000, who was also the son of his girlfriend at that time. Bruce has maintained his innocence all these years and he says he has never hit a child let alone killed one, particularly when he has helped raise 6 of his own kids.

It’s a bizarre case of a bad mother, a good boy and a scapegoat which is obvious after going through the facts and the available evidence as you will hear in the show.  What is also crazy is that you can't find much about his case on the internet, it’s like the data has been wiped out, except a lousy, one sided, police fed article from the Orlando Sentinel that I don't even want to mention here,  but you can read it for yourself.

It’s like no one even bothered to check the facts of this case? Nor follow up on what really occurred.

Joining me from Clermont State Prison in Florida on this episode of FairPlay is Bruce Smith who despite being wrongfully convicted for a crime he says he did not commit, and with so many Brady Violations in his case, has no recourse left, after all his appeals and motions have been denied so far. What I fail to understand is after listening to Bruce and going through the facts, with what face can a judge deny him a fair hearing?

According to the medical records, Bruce was deceased in 2008, but then he woke up, while some nurses were being trained using his body.

Bruce has some unfinished business to take care of. His final push is to get his hands on the evidence box that's sitting somewhere in a Florida state prison or a crime lab that can potentially help to exonerate him.

The question is, who will get to it first?

| Imran Siddiqui is the managing editor at Justice News and the author of the JBlog.

Email - imran@jnews.network or Catch his podcast FairPlay on  j107 Justice Radio

December 24 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News

Who Watches The Watchers?

Especially when the so-called "Watchers" "Guards" are evil and mentally sick.

So imagine you’re in prison for something that you did and you've been judged upon by the court system and you're in there paying the price of what you did. Fair enough. But what happens when while you're in there paying the price of the wrong that you did, you also get some extra benefits, like -

Being Punched

Beat Up

Your Balls Getting Smacked With a Rod

Leaving You Naked For a Couple of Days in Freezing Temperatures While You Sleep In Urine

With Shit All Around You - on the Walls the Ceilings the Floor - spread by a Hepatitis C Patient.

Why?

Well, because they want to teach you a lesson, punish you so badly that you never forget it.

Yes. Trent won't forget it.

Continue on The JBlog - FairPlay.

https://www.justicenews.net

Once there was a time, long long time ago, when people didn't have to look shocked or dumbfounded if someone mentioned the word, Marijuana or Cannabis. In fact, no one even bothered, they used it in many different ways and extracts of it were available over the counter, like Aspirin today, but just better. It's been a long time coming for Marijuana Justice in America. Decades of locking people up just because they were consuming a plant that God created, while allowing all the harmful  chemicals, actually poison in your food, to be a part of our daily diet. Look at the consequences on your own health because of the garbage that we eat and put in our bodies. Michael Krawitz cofounder of VAMJ Virginia Marijuana Justice and executive director of VMCA, is working to change marijuana laws and perceptions to bring change. Read the full post on The JBlog. Listen to this episode on FairPlay. Justice Has No Color.

November 21 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News.

Reader Discretion is Advised.

Imagine being in prison for over 35 years for a crime that you did not commit and no matter how hard you tried, no matter how clear the evidence of your innocence is and who else on this earth comes to support your exoneration, the state nor the government with no remorse or shame, just won't let you go.

Who's face are you going to punch?

When there is not one but many hidden behind a gigantic machine.

But David, killed Goliath!

Read on at The JBlog - https://www.justicenews.net/post/fairplay-ep13-s2-temujin-kensu-the-man-they-don-t-want-to-let-go

Discover more on FairPlay - https://www.justicenews.net/temujinkensu

October 24 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News. Reader Discretion is Advised.

When I started writing about Wrongful Convictions some time back I had not intended to find so much of dirt buried right under the façade of an incredibly evil and unjust criminal justice system that is a cesspool of dishonest and disgraceful individuals from the police, the prosecutors, the public defenders, to the clerks, the judges and everyone else involved in making blood money from a fucked up prison system.

Not to forget the federal government that enslaved men and now enslaves everyone working  for them or not. Their vision now is so diseased they won't even realize how this failed system is eating up their own tail as it slowly moves to ingest its own body while it cannibalizes on it's own on species spread throughout the decaying tentacles of the U.S. state and federal governments and the American society as a whole.

Read on the John Merritt Case at the JBlog - https://www.justicenews.net/post/fairplay-ep-12-john-merritt-an-indictment-of-america

October 10 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News. Reader Discretion is Advised.

I won't even mention media sources here, after these few sentences, because their sources are rigged.

The way the anchor, the reporter and the TV network in Atlanta Georgia behaved in this video, back in 2009, I highly doubt if they will be as giddy and as excited to own their mistakes, once proven wrong, and may not have the courage to report the truth when it becomes apparent to them and to everyone else, that how blatantly wrong they were and how the media becomes a stooge of the state.

I'm genuinely trying hard these days not to use any cuss words when I work on the Jblog or Fairplay, but it's very difficult to hold back when the arrogance without any truth and the lack of Uncommon sense in people become clear.

Especially in those who are in some kind of a powerful position, be it in media, in the justice system or any other man made stupid sector.

They forget that this position can easily be taken away from them, one day, and they will have to answer to what they have sent forth.  I would not say this had I not tasted the condition of my own command that I sent forth to my own soul, with my own hands, until they came back to meet me. And I am a captive to them and I am an asshole just like you, it's just that I'm accepting it. We should always remain teachable or your arrogance will be chastened.

What are the odds of this occurring? Think about it. Even if it's 1 percent of the total U.S. prison population, that would be around 20 thousand people. Now imagine if your family member is one of them.

Read on at The Jblog

September 8 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News

Isn't it the responsibility of the prosecutors, the judges and the police officers to seek the truth, to seek justice? Or are they in it just to seek convictions?

Many argue that now in America, you are first presumed guilty rather than innocent, and after getting wrongfully convicted, you can spend the rest of your remaining life, fighting for your freedom.

They call it, The Prison Industrial Complex, a state of the art human algorithm of banking on other peoples misery. It’s an industry that needs to be fed, so they say, so it can feed them. But what they don't understand is they are only feeding a false narrative that will eventually come to bite them as it comes to a collapse because it’s fundamental foundation is based on injustice.

You can call it, The Justice Industrial Complex, in the guise of pretending to be just, where everyone is mostly after making some money while some are after freedom and justice.

Take a Deep Dive in to the case of Leonard Coleman, he’s serving a life sentence at the St Clair Correctional facility in Alabama. For the past decade, he’s been trying to fight what he calls, his unjust conviction of the murder of Kimberly Mixon who was found dead in December 2010 with a gunshot wound to her eye. Kimberly is also the mother of Leonard’s son, Xayvion who was 4 when his mother died, and they allege it all happened in front of him.

But what you or I say or think is the truth doesn't really stand in front of the facts, the ground realities, and no matter how much you would hate it or how hard you try to accept it, or not, the truth does not have your or my versions, nor does it need any of our permissions, the truth is simply just the truth.

In the case of Leonard Coleman, the biggest element that is missing is the whole truth. It’s a story riddled with holes that would make you want to gasp for air. If you have the patience to go through a conversation of over 2 hours, which I highly doubt that you would do, not because you would rather want to watch or listen to the latest flick on your chosen streaming platform to kill time, but because you don't want to know what is actually going on in your own country, in your own backyard. And if you don't know it, and if it comes to you too, then you won’t know what to do and would fall victim to this joke being played upon us. Leonard Coleman has been fighting back attacks all his life and he even fought another case from inside the prison and actually won and was acquitted. Can he do it once again?

This is the

August 19 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News

Trinity Matthisen has spent the last two decades of his life inside a prison. Right now he is somewhere in Michigan, behind bars, in a small, very uncomfortable cage, for something, he says, he did not do, for a crime, evidence may prove, he did not commit.

Can you imagine what I just said, does it sound so repetitive that it has become acceptable to hear this? Have we become accustomed to this, so used to it by now, is it something normal? We have been desensitized to the fact that we love to incarcerate people who probably are innocent of the crime for which they have been punished for, and punitively, unjustly, wrongly, wickedly punished and for what? Prison as Rehabilitation, Matthisen says, is a lie.

Trinity Milford Matthisen, originally from Colorado, is at Chippewa Correctional Facility in Kincheloe, Michigan doing time for convictions of assault with intent to murder, felon in possession of a firearm and three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. He was sentenced as a third habitual offender to 40 to 70 years imprisonment for his assault conviction, 57 months to 120 years imprisonment for his felon in possession of a firearm conviction, and two years’ imprisonment for each felony-firearm conviction. The felony-firearm sentences run concurrently to each other, but consecutively to his other sentences. That sounds terrifying, in many ways, and especially when you hear the word felon, but you need to hold the judgements until you know both sides of the story and especially coming from someone who is actually living that kind of a reality. Matthisen is in for “at least 40 to 70 years”. In his own simple words, they have destroyed his life and he was railroaded by a few friends, the prosecutors and lies from false witness testimony.

But Trinity Matthisen is not giving up that easily, he argues that the obliteration of his rights, just because he had a prior record, is evident in his court records and you don't need much to find out how he was denied his basic constitutional rights even before his trial began and during it. He says, to get to that conclusion, all you have to do is go through his entire case files, and probe the police reports that are not publicly available, along with more than 30 eyewitness accounts that are missing or have been lost or hidden. He is also stunned at the jaw dropping denial of his FOIA requests. Trinity argues that evidence is being kept away from him, evidence that can potentially exonerate him and that he has enough material to push for a retrial of his case, as long as an attorney has the courage to seek the truth, without prejudice.

But what is there to hide? And how much truth is there in the

August 14 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News.Net

What do you do when out of three the people you have, the only one who can tell you exactly what happened, is dead?

How much truth can you find in the remaining two people, one of whom is an accuser and the other one, a defendant.

Michigan resident Rose Larner was killed, or overdosed on cocaine or murdered somewhere between the late afternoon and evening of a December day in 1993 and all this occurred between three friends. Bill Brown, Rose’s childhood friend, accused another friend John Ortiz Kehoe of the murder, three years after it allegedly occurred. Bill’s account given to the prosecutors was the only eyewitness testimony used to convict John Ortiz Kehoe and it sent him to life behind bars without any possibility of parole. But a new hearing on John’s case raises many questions about what really occurred on that day in December of 1993.

Since the past 25 years while incarcerated John has maintained his innocence, and according to him, it was Bill Brown who was the last person left with Rose because John left the two together and went to Mcdonalds to get some food and upon his return found a highly nervous Bill Brown and the dead body of Rose in the bathroom.

Too much has been said about this case in the past two decades. I accidentally stumbled upon John’s case while listening to the FreeMe Podcast hosted by Thomas Herold. In the case of John Ortiz Kehoe not a single witness was presented from his side. The more you read some of the actual case files the more bizarre the case looks, not because of what the actual accusations were, nor by what the prosecutors were trying to do and not by what was being reported by the media, it looked bizarre because it has so many holes in it that it is now impossible for it to hold any water.

This could probably come out as one of the most erroneously reported cases in the history of journalism in the United States of America, and if and when that occurs, it can help address the allegations being made in this case that big media took spoon fed information from the prosecutor's office and ran with it without even taking an independent look at the facts and then made a business out of that lie for decades. More digging may even show, how some of the media companies, thinkin

July 22, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

You have got to seriously pause for a few seconds and put yourself in this situation, after I ask you this question...

What do you do in a moment when you are under assault?...

Should you give in.

Should you run?

Or Should you fight…

There’s not much time left for other questions here.

But what if the attack is also a sexual assault

A man to another man... Someone in your home...

Would that make you think twice about what to do next?

Are you thinking that this is something that cannot happen to you?

If you do, then you live in a dreamworld, like most of us do.

But if you think that you can also be a victim, under assault by a person who was known to have a record and history of aggressive assaults, but you didn’t know about it, then you are not alone.

Luke Wirkkala was also asking himself the same questions, when he was under a sexual assault by someone he had trusted and had invited him to his home after a day of super bowl drinking, but after Luke passed out on his couch, he was awoken at 2 am while David Ryder was assaulting him. It was a moment of reckoning, thus activating the instinct to defend himself.

Luke was wrongfully convicted of murder in 2013 and after a long, exhausting and cruel battle, he was acquitted of that murder in 2021.

In this episode of FairPlay Luke Wirkkala takes you through a weird reality that can turn anybody’s dream into a nightmare and then witness the power of principles, persistence and faith.

Read more at The JBlog on Justice News.Net

Peace.

June 10, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

Justice for Lydell has finally been achieved but not without a hard fight. In our previous episode of FairPlay we spoke to Mike Ware the defense attorney for Lydell Grant and we discussed Lydell's extraordinary case of wrongful imprisonment and its following consequences. In this week's episode we speak to Lydell Grant himself as he unloads some facts about his case and lays bare the injustices within the U.S. criminal justice system that can completely decimate an innocent man's life forever.

God is in control, says Lydell, and the truth is always enough to stand on its own. And that he is not looking for apologies, though he deserves it, from all parties involved that wrongfully convicted and incarcerated him for life, only if they could, because he got exonerated within a decade. According to Grant, there was a higher power watching over him. "It was God", says Lydell Grant, "Who took him out of the clutches of an unjust criminal justice system".

The question is, how can you proceed to charge an innocent man in a court of law for a crime he did not commit and when there is no evidence proving that he committed that crime? Shouldn't this be outlawed. What happened to the "innocent until proven guilty" part? Currently Grant is working on his music career and he also plans to launch his own non profit organization that will seek to exonerate other individuals who are innocent but incarcerated and still left behind, but not for long. The times have changed, so the system must change as well, says Lydell.

Lydell wants a law enacted that can hold those prosecutors and investigators and judges accountable who act maliciously against a defendant. Grant talked about something he says he never mentioned before, how he had to fight major conflicts of interests in his case and how he endured his decade long nightmare in prison where the odds were already stacked up against him from the beginning. He says the truth is not bi

June 1, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

Lydell Grant spent more than 9 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, but being free now, safe in the comfort of his home in Houston Texas, didn't come without a fight. It took him a decade to break free from the chains of a Cruel Prison-System where he was unjustly incarcerated for almost a decade.

On this journey Lydell didn't fight alone. His attorney Mike Ware was there to pull some hard punches, and some of them, landed right on their opponents faces and bled and broke a few noses and bones.

Mike Ware is a seasoned criminal defense Lawyer based out of Fort Worth in Texas. Mike is also an adjunct professor at the Texas A&M School of Law and is the Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Texas. You can read more about his work on Mike Ware Law.

Lydell Grant was arrested for the 2010 murder of Aaron Scheerhoorn outside a nightclub in Houston’s Montrose district. Six eyewitnesses, looking at a photo lineup, identified Grant as the killer. And in the words of Michael Hall, a reporter at TexasMonthly.com, Grant swore he was innocent. “We have six eyewitnesses that can positively identify you as the killer,” Grant remembers a detective telling him. “I don’t care if you have six hundred witnesses,” he said. “I didn’t kill him.” Six eyewitnesses testified against Grant at trial and he was convicted in 2012.

According to the Harris County District Attorney's Office, Lydell Grant was wrongfully accused in the 2010 stabbing death of Aaron Scheerhoorn outside a Montrose bar in downtown Houston. Jermarico Carter, turned out to be the real killer, with DNA evidence, and who confessed to the murder almost a decade later. Lydell was out on bail in 2019 and then in 2021 Texas board of appeals declared Grant innocent and finally exonerated.

Mike touched on many critical issues related to the bitter realities of the U.S. justice system. From the role of a spoon-fed medi

It Took 27 Years For Him To Get Justice

May 17, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

Joining me on this episode of FairPlay is someone who persistently fought for justice for his own life and his freedom and for the truth and he got it but it took him about 27 years to get there, and his name is Valentino Dixon. And he spoke with us out of Buffalo NewYork.

On June 12, 1992, the jury convicted Dixon of second-degree murder of Torriano Jackson, attempted murder, assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to 38 1/3 years to life in prison.

Fast forward to 26 plus years to September 19, 2018, Lamarr Scott, the actual shooter, who admitted to this crime many times before, pled guilty to manslaughter in return for a sentence that would run with the 25 to 50 year sentence he was already serving for another killing.

That same day, Dixon’s convictions for second-degree murder of Torriano Jackson, attempted murder, and assault were vacated and the prosecution dismissed the charges. The conviction for criminal possession of a weapon remained intact because the TEC-9 that Scott said he used in the shooting belonged to Dixon. Dixon was then released from prison more than 27 years after his arrest in 1991.

Valentino's case is best described in the words of Max Adler at The Golf Digest.

"The case is complicated, but on the surface it involves shoddy police work, zero physical evidence linking Dixon, conflicting testimony of unreliable witnesses, the videotaped confession to the crime by another man, a public defender who didn’t call a witness at trial, and perjury charges against those who said Dixon didn’t do it. All together, a fairly clear instance of local officials hastily railroading a young black man with a prior criminal record into jail. Dixon’s past wasn’t spotless, he had sold some cocaine, but that didn’t make him a murderer."

A lot of the unjust and cruel treatment that Valentino has suffered throughout his 27 year long nightmare can easily be understood by going through the work of Phil Fairbanks at The Buffalo News and by Maurice Possley senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations. For now he awaits the result of a pending law suit against his accusers. His nightmare, partly continues, he says in the interview, the city ran out of money.

But do you think someone who's been exonerated, proved out to be right and innocent of the crimes they said he committed, do you think that person can ever lead a normal life? Do you think they have destroyed that person’s life?

What's next for Valentino Dixon?

Find out on FairPlay at 

May 9, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

The mission of The National Registry of Exonerations is to provide comprehensive information on exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in order to prevent future false convictions by learning from past errors.

But have we done just that?

Joining me on this episode of FairPlay and to speak about The Registry is Barbara O'Brien. Barbara is a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, where she teaches classes in criminal law and procedure. She is currently the Editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, which “collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States from 1989 to the present.” The Registry provides a virtual home for exoneration stories and also an accessible, searchable statistical database about the cases.

Barbara spoke about how the Registry started and evolved and has contributed to positively impacting many lives across America.

She differentiated between DNA evidence, jailhouse informants, false testimony, and witness tampering. She talked about prosecutorial misconduct, unfair judgements, bail bonds, the prison industry and how can we, if possible, and if ever be able to predict false convictions.

I asked her, why is it so easy to incarcerate someone wrongly in America, but so difficult to get the same individual honorably released?.

We also talked about the role of race in a fair and impartial jury selection and in the final outcome of most cases and punishments. I asked Barbara if the Registry has been successful in making police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges more sensitive to the problem of wrongful convictions and more willing to reconsider the guilt of defendants who have already been convicted when new evidence of innocence comes to light.

One of my suggestions to her was to implore the concept of developing an "Innocence List", to at least start collecting basic data on those individuals who are claiming to be innocent with clear evidence.

The question remains, have we learned enough to prevent future false convictions, have we learned enough of anything from our past errors?.

Find out on FairPlay.show