What is the legal definition of actual innocence?...
What is 'actual innocence' in US justice?
Wed, 20 Apr 2016 - Could a radical experiment save the broken US justice system?
What is 'actual innocence' in US justice?
Wed, 20 Apr 2016 - Could a radical experiment save the broken US justice system?
In St Clair County, Illinois, the local prosecutor is trying a radical new experiment: admitting his office has charged innocent people with crimes and clearing their names before they spend a day in prison. It's a unique reform effort as prosecutors around the country face increased scrutiny and diminishing public trust. Lashonda Moreland's day had barely begun when the pounding on the front door began. Her husband had already left for work, and she was home with her two children in their second storey apartment in a suburb of St Louis, Missouri.
When a voice barked through the door, Moreland realised the figures outside were police officers. "He said, 'You need to open up the door or we're going to kick it down,'" she recalls. "My kids are scared and they're crying...I'm upset and I start crying." The police arrested Moreland - a 30-year-old home healthcare worker with no criminal history - and she spent the next several days in various jails until she was transferred over the river to St Clair County, Illinois. "It was scary because I had never been in jail. I never had to be on lockdown," she says. "I literally cried every day. I was trying to wrap my mind around, 'Why am I in here?'" Moreland was accused of shoplifting, evading police and for trying to run down a police officer with her car.
Lashonda Moreland outside of the home where she was arrested
Several months prior to her arrest, a young couple walked into an Old Navy store in a strip mall in Fairview Heights, Illinois. They shoveled little girls' coats, jeans and pants into bags, some still attached to their hangers, then walked out and got into a maroon Buick LeSabre with nearly $700 (£495) worth of stolen merchandise. A security guard called the police. The responding officers from the Fairview Heights Police Department quickly located the car at a traffic signal, and an officer named Drew Rutter got out of his patrol vehicle and approached the driver's side of the Buick on foot. "The driver and I made eye contact, and I observed her grasp the steering wheel," Rutter later wrote in his report. "Fearing for my life and the safety of others in the area, I immediately drew my department issued duty weapon."
The car lurched past him and another officer, missing Rutter's legs by "inches", and disappeared down the highway. All the police had was the licence plate number, which was registered to Lashonda Moreland's address. When Officer Rutter looked at Moreland's driver's licence photo, he immediately identified her as the woman who had tried to run him over. Moreland didn't own a Buick, nor did she do her shopping 30 minutes away in a completely different state. She did, however, have a cousin who had registered his maroon Buick LeSabre to her address without telling her. She explained all this to the Fairview Heights police when they first contacted her after the incident, but they didn't believe her.
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