Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for 12 Years Sues After Learning Key Eyewitness Was Blind

[bnew]

Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for 12 Years Sues After Learning Key Eyewitness Was Blind

Darien Harris was an 18-year-old high school senior when he was sentenced to 76 years in prison for a 2011 fatal shooting in South Side Chicago -- freed after serving a dozen by The Exoneration Project.

toofab.com

Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for 12 Years Sues After Learning Key Eyewitness Was Blind​

NewsBy TooFab Staff|5/29/2024 2:00 PM PT

AP

Darien Harris was sentenced to 76 years in prison in 2014 for a fatal shooting in South Side Chicago when he was just 18 years old -- before The Exoneration Project freed him in December.​

Darien Harris is a free man after serving 12 years of a 76 year sentence -- but he's not yet satisfied that justice has been served. Harris was an 18-year-old high school senior when he was arrested and picked out of a police lineup in 2011 for a fatal shooting at a gas station in South Side Chicago.

In 2014, he was convicted of the crime and sentenced to what would effectively be the remainder of his life behind bars. There was just one problem. Per the Chicago Tribune, one key eyewitness who claimed he saw the crime, picked Harris out of that lineup, and visually ID'd him in court was legally blind.


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The witness claimed he was riding his motorized scooter near the South Side gas station when he heard gunshots. He said he then saw a person, whom he positively ID'd as Harris multiple times throughout the legal proceedings, holding a gun.

While the eyewitness insisted it was Harris, a gas station attendant testified that he wasn't the shooter. The eyewitness' testimony was a key component in Harris' guilty verdict.

He was freed by The Exoneration Project, a Chicago-based organization seeking to right wrongful convictions. The organization has helped more than 200 people since 2009, and in December 2023, they helped Harris walk out of prison.

In fighting for his release, the Exoneration Project showed that the prosecution's key eyewitness had lied about his eyesight and was actually legally blind when he allegedly saw Harris commit the crime, much less when he later picked him out of a lineup and ID'd him in court.


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Harris' attorney during the trial had asked the witness if his diabetes impacted his vision, but the witness denied he had any vision problems. This was clearly a falsehood, as The Exoneration Project showed that court records showed the witness' doctor had declared him legally blind with advanced glaucoma nine years prior to the lineup.

Now 31 years old, Harris has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago and the police department. Harris' suit is alleging that police fabricated evidence and compelled witnesses to make false statements.

Having been incarcerated his entire adult life, he says he's struggling to figure out his place in the world, or be accepted by it.

"I don't have any financial help. I'm still [treated like] a felon, so I can't get a good job. It's hard for me to get into school," he told the Tribune.

"I've been so lost," he continued. "I feel like they took a piece of me that is hard for me to get back."

 

[UWasntThere]

CPD y'all

 

[xXOGLEGENDXx]

 

[O³ (O cubed)]

Isn't there already a thread on this? I remember it was around the end of 2023.


Edit: yeah there was one. You made the thread.

‘The Best Christmas Gift Ever’: Testimony of Legally Blind Witness Landed Chicago Man In Prison for 76 Years, Now He Will be Freed After Serving 12...

 

[DaPresident]

Ain't no amount of money gonna bring back essentially his young adult life...Give him millions and he STILL was penned up for 12 years, some of the best of your young life.

They can start at like $12-20 million at the very least...some foul ish, and the blind guy should be put in jail and told that someone is gonna punch him in the face, but they won't tell him the time so he constantly wincing and getting ready for a punch that may or may not come...pussassnikka

 

[8WON6]

Isn't there already a thread on this? I remember it was around the end of 2023.


Edit: yeah there was one. You made the thread.

‘The Best Christmas Gift Ever’: Testimony of Legally Blind Witness Landed Chicago Man In Prison for 76 Years, Now He Will be Freed After Serving 12...

Black man in Chicago exonerated for a 2011 murder...in that case A LEGALLY BLIND PERSON GAVE EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

https://apnews.com/article/exonerations-cook-county-convictions-darrien-harris-77e793f3ad6cf97bd896ba892b420718 BY COREY WILLIAMS Updated 11:29 PM CST, December 21, 2023 Share Darien Harris spent more than 12 years in an Illinois prison, convicted of murder in part on the testimony of an...

www.thecoli.com

 

[Neo TheInsurrectionistONE]

Blind cac walked into the line up and just did an eeny meeny miney moe and picked a random breh?

 

[O³ (O cubed)]

Several threads made by different brehs and it didn't even go past 10 replies.

Let it be some diaspora wars, trannies or PAWGs bullshyt. shyt goes platinum.

 

[8WON6]

Several threads made by different brehs and it didn't even go past 10 replies.

Let it be some diaspora wars, trannies or PAWGs bullshyt. shyt goes platinum.

people really love the incarceration part of these stories and have a lot to say then. But when it's the exoneration part, people get real quiet for some reason.

 

[In The Zone '98]

If you didn't do a crime and weren't near the crime. An alibi ain't that hard to show

What the fukk was his attorney doing

 

[Drip Bayless]

US “Justice” system
That witness should be in prison for perjury at the very least.

 

[Yzak]

Blind cac walked into the line up and just did an eeny meeny miney moe and picked a random breh?

Thats the justice system of occupied people.

 

[bnew]

If you didn't do a crime and weren't near the crime. An alibi ain't that hard to show

What the fukk was his attorney doing

it is hard to show for people who keep to themselves and aren't terminally online.

How ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ saved this man from prison

Juan Catalan has been to many memorable games at Dodger Stadium. In the early 1980s, his Uncle Thomas took him to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch. Juan and his brother huddled in the cheap seats, pas…

nypost.com

The Dodgers fan had an alibi, having been at the stadium with his 6-year-old daughter, Melissa, his cousin and a friend on the night of the murder. But that wasn’t enough for the LAPD and the prosecutor — who had never lost a case and was going to push for the death penalty for Puebla’s murderer.

When a MetroCard Is an Alibi

Also in the Morning Buzz: the collapse of a budget deal in Albany, big fare and toll increases under consideration by the M.T.A., and more headlines from local papers.

archive.nytimes.com

When a MetroCard Is an Alibi​

BY SEWELL CHAN NOVEMBER 19, 2008 8:57 AMNovember 19, 2008 8:57 am

A MetroCard could be the deciding factor in the case of Jason Jones, who was arrested, along with his brother, in a fatal shooting in the Bronx in May, but told the police that he had been nowhere near the scene. Mr. Jones said he had left work, ridden the bus with some co-workers and cashed his paycheck, and later had taken a subway to see his girlfriend.

Months after the arrests, a retired detective working for Mr. Jones’s lawyers drove to a city jail on a barge moored in the East River in the South Bronx, where Mr. Jones had been held after his arrest, and retrieved his wallet. The MetroCard was still inside.

Mr. Jones’s lawyers then asked New York City Transit to use the card to trace his movements the night of the shooting. The results supported his account, showing that the card had been used on a bus, and later on a subway roughly five miles from the shooting, just as he had described. The two brothers have now been released on bail — an unusual move in a murder case — while the investigation continues.

this guy got lucky..

Facebook status update provides alibi - CNN.com

For 19-year-old Rodney Bradford, a simple Facebook status update turned into much more: a rock-solid alibi after he was accused of a crime.

www.cnn.com

Facebook status update turned into much more: a rock-solid alibi after he was accused of a crime.

Confirmation of the time stamp on the update and the location from which it was entered showed he could not have been at the scene of a robbery in another part of New York City. After he had spent almost two weeks in jail, the case against him was dismissed.

The story began at 11:49 a.m. on Saturday, October 17, when Bradford was updating his Facebook status at his father's home in Harlem. A minute later, 12 miles away in Brooklyn, two men were mugged at gunpoint.

The next day, Bradford, who is facing a separate 2008 robbery indictment, found out police were looking for him in connection with the Brooklyn robbery.

Bradford turned himself in, confident he would be cleared. But after one of the victims picked him out of a lineup, he was charged with robbery in the first degree and sent to Rikers Island, home of the New York City jail.

It wasn't until Rodney Bradford Sr. discovered his son's Facebook update that the young man's defense attorney realized he had an unbeatable alibi.

"Throughout that week," said the attorney, Robert Reuland, "I worked with the district attorney's office and made them aware of who our alibis were, presented the Facebook evidence and generally tried to convince them that it would be wrong to proceed to an indictment in light of this evidence."

The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook for documentation that would prove Bradford had updated his account from his father's home in Harlem. It worked.

"It all corroborated our alibis," explained Reuland. "The Facebook thing was really the icing on the cake. I think, ultimately, it's what prompted the DA to dismiss."

The district attorney's office would not comment on the story because the case is sealed.

Facebook officials said they are "pleased" they were "able to serve as a constructive part of the judicial process."

The online social network is ready to join telephone records and video cameras as a means of establishing an alibi -- but the implications are both good and bad, says an intellectual property attorney versed in the medium.

"We're in a much more trackable world, and for better and for worse," said attorney Jonathan Handel. "The extent to which it means that the right people get prosecuted and the innocent get their cases dropped, that's all of the good."

But, he said, the issue of privacy is also at stake.

And he pointed out that it could be argued the Facebook update was a set-up.

"On the Internet, nobody really knows it's you," he said. "A kid could set up an alibi by setting up a Facebook update."

Reuland finds that unlikely.

"This is a 19-year-old kid. He's not a criminal genius setting up an elaborate alibi for himself," he said. "This is not the kind of thing someone would fake." And if someone were going to fake it, he said, "They'd do it in a lot clearer way" than the inside joke that Bradford posted: "On the phone with this fat chick... where my IHOP."

The message was met with some incomprehension by reporters first writing about the story, who didn't quite understand the reference to the International House of Pancakes.

Reuland explained it this way: The "fat chick" was a playful reference to Bradford's pregnant girlfriend who was irked that he, his father and his stepmother had gone to an IHOP without her the night before. The update teased that she wondered where her pancakes were.

"He was just kind of taunting her playfully about having been to IHOP," Reuland said. "I know it sounds not very nice but it's sort of a reference to her because she's pregnant. But they actually have a very good relationship. She's cute as a button."

Now that his innocence has been demonstrated, Bradford has hired civil attorney Herbert L. Schmell, who said they are "99.9 percent sure" that they will be filing a civil suit against the city.

"Based upon what I see, there was no probable cause to arrest him at the time," Schmell said. "And to put him in Rikers for 12 or 13 days. ... We're seeking money damages. He's shook up."

 

[mag357]

Our justice system yall

 

[315]

Jesus