- Justice is done at LAST Archived Message
Posted by Raskolnikov
on June 6, 2020, 10:05 am
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and it only took TWENTY-THREE years on Death Row. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/walter-ogrod-wrongful-conviction-overturned-pennsylvania-death-row/ n an emotional hearing on Friday morning, a Philadelphia judge overturned the wrongful conviction of Walter Ogrod, a move that will see him released after more than two decades on death row. The vindication of Ogrod has been a long time coming. Prosecutors agreed months ago that state misconduct had wrongly condemned him and that Ogrod should be released, yet the judge failed to act, even as the pandemic set in and Ogrod, now 55, became seriously ill. “Walter Ogrod’s case is impossibly tragic,” James Rollins, one of Ogrod’s attorneys, said in a statement after the hearing. “This innocent man and his family lost almost 30 years that they should have spent together. Instead, that irreplaceable time together is gone, lost to a system that keeps making the same mistakes.” In 2018, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s conviction integrity unit agreed to review the case. After a year of inquiry, the office concluded that Ogrod was convicted based on a staggering level of police and prosecutorial misconduct, including numerous instances of the state failing to turn over evidence that pointed to Ogrod’s innocence. “At trial, Ogrod found himself adrift in a perfect storm of unreliable scientific evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, Brady violations, and false testimony,” Krasner’s CIU chief, Patricia Cummings, wrote to the court in a brief filed in February. Based on its investigation, the DA’s office joined Ogrod’s defense team in asking for his release from prison. “Ogrod is likely innocent, and his continued incarceration constitutes an ongoing miscarriage of justice. The commonwealth urges this court to grant Ogrod relief and vacate his conviction and sentence.” The whole sorry saga is covered in detail in "The Trials of Walter Ogrod" by Tom Lowenstein. I don't think it's coincidence that they FINALLY decide to release him at this moment, when it will be lost in a sea of other coverage. It also demonstrates it's the entire criminal justice system that is broken in the U.S. and not just the enforcement side of it. |
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