Saturday, August 27, 2022

I Cannot Fathom The Injustice

It's good that The Innocence Project exists, and sad that it needs to:

A Louisiana man has been exonerated after spending more than 36 years in jail for rape, according to court documents.

Sullivan Walter, now 53, was "exonerated after 36 years, 1 month, and 30 days incarcerated for a rape he did not commit," Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) said in an Instagram post...
 
Walter was arrested for the rape and his jury trial lasted one day, according to court documents. 
 
Walter went through numerous appeals, but from 1997 until October 2021, Walter had no legal assistance, court documents say. 
 
After taking on Walter's case in October 2021, IPNO attorneys "discovered that though the serological testing in the 1980s concluded that Mr. Walter was not the perpetrator, the jury that convicted Mr. Walter did not know this," the organization said. 
There's no indication in the story that there was a racial bias in this situation:
About a month and-a-half after the rape, Walter was arrested for simple burglary and when police thought he looked like the man L.S. (the rape victim) described, a photo array was presented to L.S. and she identified Walter as the rapist, court documents say. Walter was wearing a blue baseball cap in the photo, the same color hat the man who raped her was wearing.
Race?  Trauma of being raped?  Hard to say.

So much sadness in this story.

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