Anyone who has been wrongfully accused of doing something they know they did not do will understand the immense frustration that comes with it. Fortunately for most people, that boils down to someone saying they took the last donut or let slip a bit of gas. Unfortunately for others, it involves horrible crimes that lead to hard time in prison. Here are ten cases of people being accused and convicted of terrible things they never actually did.
10
Darryl Hunt
Race relations are always a touchy subject—and they were at the heart of the 1984 case of Darryl Hunt, an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. At the age of nineteen, Hunt was convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman named Deborah Sykes—despite the fact that there was no physical evidence tying him to the crimes. Even with zero evidence pointing to Hunt, he was sentenced by an all-white jury to life in prison.
In 1994, Hunt was actually cleared of the rape when DNA testing proved he had never committed that crime. Despite the rape being central to the overall crime, he spent an additional nine years in prison until a man named Willard Brown confessed to both acts. So after nineteen years of life in prison, Hunt was finally exonerated in 2004. Since being released from prison, he has worked with The Innocence Project and founded the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice, as well as the Darryl Hunt Freedom Fighters, in order to help other wrongfully convicted men and women.
9
Arthur Allan Thomas
It would be nice to think that police planting evidence and framing suspects only existed in movies and on television, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately for Arthur Allan Thomas, those two things are all too real—and in 1971, they helped lead to his conviction for two murders he did not commit. A man and woman named Jeanette and Harvey Crewe had been murdered in their home in Waikato, New Zealand. It would later be discovered that the police had planted a cartridge from Thomas’s rifle in the couple’s garden.
Thomas was actually convicted twice for the same crime, having lost an appeal along the way. There was finally a royal commission which uncovered the suspicious actions of the police throughout the investigation, which Thomas says includes using things he told them against him. Thomas has been out of prison for more than thirty years, but his family is still seeking justice in the form of charges against the police responsible. Of course at this point that’s not really possible, as the two men who fabricated the evidence are both dead.
8
Richard Jewell
Unlike the rest of the people on this list, Richard Jewell was never actually convicted of any crime—but he is here because in 1996 he became one of the most infamous men on the planet. That’s because when a bomb exploded at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, it was Jewell whom the FBI said was the chief suspect in this act of terror.
At the time, Jewell was a thirty-four-year-old security guard. He’d spotted a suspicious package in the Olympic Village and reported it to the authorities. Shortly afterwards, it exploded—killing one person and injuring more than one hundred others.
Basically, because Jewell had done his job, he became the prime suspect in the bombing—and he was quickly villainized. He was cleared of any charges in October of that same year—but that was well after he had been found guilty in the court of public opinion. Like many cases of the wrongfully accused and convicted, the Jewell case exhibited several aspects of botched police work, such as the FBI questioning him under the pretense of “creating a training video”—which, if you couldn’t already guess, is all kinds of wrong.
7
Thomas Kennedy
Children can be handfuls—just ask any parent. They can be especially rambunctious and hard to deal with for a single parent, but even Thomas Kennedy probably never suspected just how horribly his own children could behave until he wound up being sentenced to fifteen years in prison for a despicable crime—which, as it turned out, he had never committed. The crime was rape, and the accuser was his then-eleven-year-old daughter, Casandra.
After nine years had passed, Casandra came forward and finally admitted to lying about the rape, and Thomas was exonerated. You might be wondering what on earth could possess a daughter to make up such an awful story about her father. Well, in her own words, she “was upset because [she] felt he wasn’t around enough.” We hate to break it to her, but if he wasn’t around enough before, getting him shipped off to prison for fifteen years wasn’t exactly going to help.
6
Donald Marshall, Jr.
When you are convicted of murder at the age of seventeen and sentenced to life in prison, it must be pretty tough to handle. That’s especially true when you are innocent—and even more so when it is later determined that racism had played a huge factor throughout the entire process. That’s what happened in 1971 to Donald Marshall, Jr., a Mi’kmaq man from Canada, when he was accused of murdering his friend, Sandy Seale.
Marshall was released from prison eleven years later after another witness came forward saying that someone else had stabbed Seale. Now Marshall was not exactly a model citizen; as it turns out, he and Seale had gone out and confronted a man, who wound up stabbing Seale. But being an idiot kid is no reason to spend more than a decade in prison. Even when he was acquitted, the judge basically still blamed this miscarriage of justice on Marshall himself, stating he was “the author of his own misfortune.” The prosecution had also failed to disclose evidence and had supposedly coerced witness testimony—which the judge, presumably, also blamed on Marshall.
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