Monday, September 25, 2017

The Breakthrough: A Reporter Finds a Man Proven Innocent, But Still Guilty in Eyes of the Law

 

For five days, ProPublica reporter Megan Rose hunkered down in a very small, very hot conference room in Las Vegas, surrounded by boxes brimming with legal records. She took notes and scanned documents one page at a time. The grind of investigative reporting, personified.

But in those pages lay a big payoff: a story of murder, misadventure and injustice.

Rose had come searching for details about the remarkable case of Fred Steese, a drifter wrongfully convicted of killing a circus performer in 1992. It took nearly 20 years for Steese to get out of prison, even though prosecutors had evidence showing he wasn’t guilty, and that he was likely in another state when the murder happened.

In October 2012, a judge declared Steese innocent. But Steese wound up pleading guilty nonetheless through something called the Alford plea, an increasingly common, perplexing arrangement where a defendant maintains his innocence, but accepts the status of a convicted felon, and forfeits the right to sue.

Rose put it all together in “Kafka in Vegas,” which ran in the May 2017 issue of Vanity Fair. 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: ProPublica

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