A Wrongful Eye: How an Unjust System Incarcerates the Innocent

By Annette Choy

Wrongful convictions aren't rare occurrences in the United States. In fact, between 1989 and 2019, over 2,000 people were exonerated, according to public records. Author Annette Choy delves into how this happens in a modern justice system.

A Wrongful Eye sheds light on unconscious biases that affect decisions and persp

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637301494

Book preview

A Wrongful Eye

A Wrongful Eye

How an Unjust System Incarcerates the Innocent

Annette Choy

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Annette Choy

All rights reserved.

A Wrongful Eye

How an Unjust System Incarcerates the Innocent

ISBN

978-1-63676-720-8 Paperback

978-1-63730-047-3 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-149-4 Ebook

Contents

Introduction: Learning from Stories

Part 1. Understanding the Why

Historical Mistreatment

The Science of Bias

Part 2. Factors That Lead to Wrongful Convictions

Flawed Forensic Evidence

Tackling a Wrongful Accusation

A Mother’s Heartbreak

Ring the Golden Buzzer

Running toward Freedom

Becoming a Jailhouse Lawyer

Part 3. Remembering Their Stories

Still behind Bars

No Happy Endings

Part 4. Looking Ahead

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Additional Resources

Appendix

To all those who are innocent but are still fighting for freedom.

Introduction

Learning from Stories

Keith Harward always loved to spend time in nature. Growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, he lived beside a lake where he could fish almost every day if he wanted to. He would ride his bicycle along the dirt paths and hunt in the nearby woods. He belonged out in the countryside, where he experienced North Carolina’s warm summers and the cool wind that would blow through his hair by the water.¹

After drinking away his early twenties, he was tired of waking up drunk every morning. He wanted to positively change his lifestyle. When Keith joined the US Navy in 1980, he hoped to travel and explore. He wanted to see his country and meet as many people as possible.

By 1982, Keith spent his days as a tailor and dry cleaner on the USS Carl Vinson. He rode his motorcycle back home every night to make it on time for dinner with his girlfriend. Little did he know that both his sailor uniform and his station to the USS Carl Vinson in Virginia would be easily mistaken for another sailor’s identity in the 1982 murder and rape of Jesse and Teresa Perron.² In this book, we will see how Keith and many other innocent people spent years in jail serving time for crimes they did not commit and highlighting the problem areas of the American judicial system that failed them.

The United States criminal justice system may be considered one of the strongest systems in the world. Based on the principle of innocent until proven guilty and allowing American citizens to decide the fate of the defendants, it was created to allow fairness and equality. But as we look deeper into our system, many improvements still need to be made. Countless victims have suffered at the hands of our justice system and countless individuals still need to be held accountable. In reality, in our system you are often guilty until proven innocent.

Mass incarceration is steadily increasing each year with the United States comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population, but 20 percent of the world’s incarcerated people. In 2020, almost 2.3 million people were confined nationwide. Among those, thousands of individuals have been wrongfully convicted. Between 1989 and 2019, over two thousand people have been exonerated. A total of twenty-one thousand years lost behind bars.³ As technology and science have advanced, the use of DNA evidence since 1989 has helped exonerate 375 people.⁴

Eyewitness identification and certain forensic evidence techniques have proven unreliable. Law enforcement brutality remains prevalent in cases of coercion, racial bias, and misuse of power within the court system. According to the Innocence Project, 69 percent of exonerations involved eyewitness misidentification, 43 percent involved misapplication of forensic science, 29 percent involved false confessions, and 17 percent involved informants.⁵ As scientific technology improves, cases involving DNA evidence have had the highest rates of exoneration.

However, cases of innocence that lack strong scientific evidence are often an incredibly difficult uphill battle to prove. Many individuals are currently behind bars for a crime they did not commit, simply because they do not have the resources or enough straightforward evidence. A wrongful conviction case takes an average of fourteen years to overturn. But the emotional and physical trauma can follow an unjustly incarcerated individual forever.

Viewing a New Reality

Like many Americans adapting to quarantine life in 2020, I wasted an embarrassing amount of time binging on mindless television to distract myself from the change and uncertainty swirling around me. Life in lockdown was my personal pity party—that is, until The Innocence Files caught my eye. I couldn’t look away. Until then, the thought of innocent individuals locked behind bars rarely crossed my mind. Based on the number of exonerations, the Innocence Project estimates that approximately twenty thousand people in the US prison population have been falsely convicted. University of Michigan law professor, Samuel Gross, has found there have been around 850 exonerations nationwide since the late 1980s.⁶

As I watched the nine-episode documentary of The Innocence Files, I could not stop thinking about individuals like Levon Brooks, Franky Carrillo, and the countless others who have endured so much because of the many flaws in our justice system.

Levon Brooks was wrongfully convicted and served sixteen years behind bars due to faulty forensic evidence. Levon’s freedom was hard-fought, but the fighting wasn’t over. Just ten years after his exoneration, Levon Brooks died of cancer. He was fifty-eight years old.

Franky Carrillo served twenty years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Sent to prison at only sixteen years old, his last moments with his father before he entered jail were when he was on the floor being restrained and arrested. I struggled to make sense of a system that incarcerated innocent people with a lack of evidence, legal misconduct, or purely from one eyewitness testimony. Having grown up in a country that boasts about freedom and equality, I always believed our justice system worked. How many other innocent lives have been destroyed by this severely flawed system? How could I have been unaware that this was happening? And now that I’m no longer blindly ignorant, how could I possibly look the other way?

I quickly submerged myself into research, looking for ways to help. I learned more about the injustices that occur within this system, such as unreasonable sentences, wrongful convictions, racial bias, and unfair treatment within prison facilities. It’s saddening to say those issues are just the tip of the iceberg. In the two weeks that followed, my naive view of our justice system changed and I knew I could not ignore this growing issue, especially as the Black Lives Matter movement began to gather momentum. So when I came across the Creator Institute, a program that would help me through the process of writing, publishing, and launching a book, I knew this was a chance for me to not only have a voice, but also provide a voice for others.

I will focus on the stories of those who have been wrongfully convicted—stories that reveal who people really are and their true actions. These strong individuals have suffered tremendously. Passing immediate judgment on someone we see on the news portrayed as a criminal is so common. But the media does not always provide us with the full story.

As I researched the various cases covered in the next chapters, my perspective on how I view our system shifted. The faulty practices and flawed individuals involved in the system led to these traumatic experiences. I hope that these stories will allow us to have a more open perspective and not draw the quick, often faulty, conclusions of defendants’ guilt.

Much of our determination of guilt or innocence centers on psychological biases. Our life experiences shape us. No matter how woke we may consider ourselves, our brains are wired to make biased judgments in the blink of an eye. In our self-righteous indignation at the mere suggestion of our implicit bias, we close our eyes to the threat we pose to the innocents around us. A little bit of bias can be a dangerous thing when we’re granted the power to make decisions. Whether as loan officers or law enforcement, judges or jurors, crime victims or concerned citizens, the biases we don’t see in ourselves can have real-world consequences for others. We therefore have an individual responsibility to acknowledge psychological bias within ourselves and a societal obligation to confront systemic bias in our communities.

In this book, we’ll turn a critical eye toward victims of a biased and broken criminal justice system. Through their stories, we’ll learn what it was like to serve—and survive—time in prison for crimes they did not commit. Through the lens of hindsight, we’ll sift through flawed evidence, false confessions, faulty forensics, and flagrant bias to examine what went wrong and will continue to go wrong until we open our wrongful eyes and act. Through eyes wide open, we’ll explore how we can give voice to those who fight to overcome wrongful convictions.

I hope this book will allow us to have a more open perspective and bring light into the many shortfalls that make up the messy reality of our justice system.

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1 Frank Green, Wrongly Imprisoned Man Adjusts to Freedom, Family, Technology, The Daily Progress, April 24, 2016.

2 Keith Allen Harward: The Innocence Project, Innocence Project, April 15, 2020, accessed August 3, 2020.

3 Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020, Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020, accessed August 3, 2020.

4 DNA Exonerations in the United States, Innocence Project, July 31, 2020, accessed August 3, 2020.

5 Exonerations by State Report: Wrongful Conviction Statistics in the US, Neal Davis Law Firm, accessed August 3, 2020.

6 Ibid.

Part One

Understanding the Why

Chapter 1

Historical Mistreatment

Let me find my dollar bill first, nine-year-old Mei Leung told her younger brother. As they split apart, Mei heading down to their apartment building basement and her brother heading up, those last moments of his sister will forever haunt him. It was April 10, 1984, a date residents in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district will never forget. When Mei did not return, her younger brother curiously walked down to the basement to see if she needed help. But upon entering, he heard a strangely familiar scream of terror. It was only when law enforcement arrived at the scene that he realized those cries came from him.

Her brother found Mei Leung’s lifeless body hanging from the basement pipe. Her small head and chin that relatives would often caress with love drooped down. Stab wounds covered her body and an autopsy later revealed that the killer strangled her to death. But as horrifying as this was, this was unfortunately not an uncommon crime scene during the late ‘90s.

The crime waves and press coverage from the 1970s to the 1990s fueled immense public pressure on law enforcement and politicians. Headlines such as Child Found Stabbed to Death in Bedroom Home and Elderly Couple Raped and Killed were common. Communities demanded action to decrease crime rates in their neighborhoods. Tensions ran high among cities and suburban towns as parents feared losing their children to violence. Anyone could be a victim. With the mounting number of criminal cases and a lack of proper investigations, the number of individuals convicted and sentenced increased. At the same time, however, there was also a rise in wrongful convictions that were later found in the early 2000s once DNA testing and other technologies advanced.

Politics and law enforcement were heavily intertwined