In 1990, Mr. Donald received two traffic violations for failing to yield and failing to carry car registration. He did not appear in court to answer to these traffic violations.

On February 22, 1992, five robberies and one murder occurred in the Glen Park neighborhood of Gary, Indiana. The assailant committed all of the crimes within a one-hour window. During the fourth robbery, the assailant shot and killed Bernard Jimenez. Minutes after Mr. Jimenez was shot, the final robbery of the evening was perpetrated against a retired female Gary, Indiana, police officer and her daughter. All of the victims, including the retired police officer, described the robber as an African American male with a scarred face and slight build. Aside from being African American, none of this fit Mr. Donald’s appearance.

Within days of the crime, one of the robbery victims, Rhonda Williams, called the Gary Police Department and reported that the man who robbed her was in front of her home. Willie T. Donald, who had failed to appear in court two years earlier and lived near where the robberies took place, became a suspect in the robberies and murder. It remains unclear as to why Mr. Donald was targeted as a suspect. Gary detectives then went to Mr. Donald’s workplace and learned that he was at work when Williams called the police.

On March 2, 1992, multiple Gary police vehicles arrived at the home of Mr. Donald to issue a bench warrant for failure to appear in court to answer to the traffic violations from two years prior. On March 3, 1992, Gary police officers put together a photo lineup including a picture of Willie T. Donald, who was then in custody on his failure to appear charge. Robbery victim Rhonda Williams and another robbery victim, Kimberly Belinsky, whose fiancé was the murder victim, were placed in the same room at the same time to view the photo lineup. Belinsky pointed to Mr. Donald’s photo but said that she was not sure. Rhonda Williams picked Mr. Donald’s photo out of the lineup. After Williams pointed to Donald’s photo, Belinsky then confirmed Mr. Donald as the assailant. Later that day, a physical lineup was conducted. Both Belinsky and Williams identified Mr. Donald as the perpetrator. The other four robbery victims viewed the lineup as well and none identified Mr. Donald. Mr. Donald, already in custody, was then charged with robbery and homicide.

On March 4, 1992, Gary police conducted a search of Mr. Donald’s home. The victims in the case consistently described a specific type of hat and jacket worn by the assailant, which were not produced during the search. In fact, no physical evidence linking Mr. Donald to the robberies and homicide was ever found.

Mr. Donald told officers that he was car shopping with his sister and her then fiancé at the time of the robberies. Car salesmen confirmed that they had seen Mr. Donald but could not confirm the time. Camera footage had been deleted by the time officers visited the various dealerships.

In June 1992, Mr. Donald was tried and convicted of two counts of robbery and one count of homicide. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Approximately a year after the trial, the defense learned of the witness William’s call to the police saying that the robber was in front of her house prior to Donald’s arrest. When she contacted the police at that time, the defense learned that the police had pursued this lead and had spoken to Mr. Donald’s employer, who verified that he was with her in the break room at the time of William’s call. His time card also noted that he was at work when Rhonda Williams called the police. Clearly, the man Rhonda Williams had identified as being the robber who was in front of her house was not Mr. Donald. This evidence became the basis for a post-conviction motion to vacate his conviction. The claim was that the prosecutor withheld information that would have been helpful to the defense, constituting a Brady ¹ violation. It is unclear whether the prosecutor was given this information prior to trial. Nonetheless, Mr. Donald’s post-conviction release and subsequent appeals at that time were denied.

After exhausting all of his appeals, in 2007 the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism accepted Mr. Donald’s case. They learned that while Rhonda Williams had identified Donald in the 1992 lineup, she later recanted her testimony, stating, “The detective convinced me I had the right guy,” to members of the Innocence Project.

With this new and other evidence, and after spending over 23 years in prison, on January 25, 2016, a judge vacated the convictions against Mr. Donald and granted him a new trial. Two days later, the Lake County Prosecutor’s office dismissed all charges against Mr. Donald and he was released.

This nightmare did not end upon his release. Mr. Donald continues to suffer from his wrongful conviction. Given that he entered prison at the age of 22 and exited at the age of 46, the world did not wait for him. Sadly, Mr. Donald’s ordeal is emblematic of all exonerees. His case illustrates how an innocent person can fall victim to a wrongful conviction.

Many believe that a wrongful conviction is an anomaly in the American criminal justice system, given the many existing procedural safeguards and due process rights that serve to protect defendants, and require guilty convictions to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, wrongful convictions occur more frequently than reported and point to larger systemic issues in the criminal justice system and reveal the immense pressure that criminal justice system actors are sometimes under to secure a conviction particularly in heinous crimes. At this writing, the NRE (2021) has identified over 2,900 known exonerations since 1989; however, it is difficult to quantify the precise number of exonerees as the numbers increase monthly. The NRE (n.d.) defines an exoneration as occurring when the government officially clears an individual who has been convicted of a crime based upon newly discovered or newly reviewed evidence that indicates the individual is innocent of the crime. Consequently, the term exoneree, for the purposes of this book, refers to an individual who has been wrongfully convicted for a crime and later exonerated.

The numbers of years lost through a wrongful conviction are staggering; according to the NRE, exonerees have served a total of over 24,000 years of time lost to convictions and prison sentences they never should have received in the first place (NRE, 2020a). Additionally, since 1973 over 170 individuals have been exonerated who received the death penalty (Death Penalty Information Center, 2020). Worse still is that these numbers only represent the “tip of the iceberg” or, rather, the actual known cases of wrongful conviction and exoneration (Naughton, 2007). It is impossible to ascertain the actual number of wrongful convictions as many cases are undiscovered and the wrongful conviction is only revealed upon an exoneration. While statistics are helpful to understand the scope of the problem of wrongful convictions, they do not adequately describe the overall experience and the concomitant losses of being wrongfully convicted. The wrongly convicted, whether exonerated or not, are victims of a system that is prone to error, despite the evidentiary and substantive safeguards built into the system, including rights such as the right to silence, right to counsel, and the requirement that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt for a conviction to stand. The purpose of this book is to provide a voice to those who have been victimized by the system through a wrongful conviction. In the same way that scholars study victimology by exploring the effects of crime victimization on individuals in order to understand how to best help them in the recovery process, this book is an attempt to understand the experiences of the wrongly convicted, who are also victims. Ultimately, they are victims of a criminal justice system that has taken away a fundamental freedom – liberty – as a result of systemic error.

Exoneree participants ranged in age from 19 to 41 years old at the time of their arrest and included 16 male exonerees and 8 female exonerees, 13 of whom identified as Caucasian, 8 as African American, and 3 as Hispanic. A majority of the participants were considered young adults, under 30 years old, at the time of their false arrest (79%). Exonerees were asked to identify their family’s socioeconomic status at the time that they were falsely arrested on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being those who are well off financially and with a secure job and 10 being those who are the least well off financially and without a job/education. Most individuals (n = 9, 43%) selected a socioeconomic level in the middle of the scale (score of 5). Approximately 38% (n = 8) of the exonerees selected a socioeconomic level that was “worse off” than the middle (scores 6–10), and 19% (n = 4) identified their socioeconomic level as “better off” than the middle (scores 1–4). The length of time in prison for the exonerees varied considerably, as they served from between 4½ to 33 years of wrongful imprisonment.

In addition, 13 family members connected to the exoneree were interviewed. In order to maintain their confidentiality, the exonerees gave contact information to their family and friends, and these individuals contacted the research team. The family members interviewed included children, parents, nieces or nephews, siblings, and significant others (spouses, fiancés, or others in long-term relationships) to the exonerees.

Telephone interviews were used in the conduct of this study given that they are an ideal means to reach a diverse population that was geographically dispersed and to limit contact with others due to COVID-19 restrictions; the interviews took place in August 2020. This method of interviewing also allows participants to be more relaxed, speak freely, and disclose intimate information if they so choose (Novick, 2008). Interviews were semistructured, recorded with the interviewee’s permission, and lasted approximately one hour. In order to better understand the exonerees’ experiences, questions were asked about their experiences and the challenges they faced in prison, how they coped or “fit in” with other inmates, and how their wrongful incarceration had affected them upon release, including challenges faced since their release and support they have (or have not) received. For the interviews with exonerees’ family members, questions were asked about the impact the exoneree’s incarceration had on their life, their perspectives on the exoneree’s innocence, whether they discussed the exoneree’s incarceration and subsequent release with anyone, how the relationship with the exoneree may have changed post-release, their perceptions of what had been helpful for them or the exoneree post-release, and the greatest challenges they faced during the wrongful conviction, incarceration, or release.

All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and shared with all authors. The research team analyzed the interview transcripts using conceptual content analysis in order to seek themes in words or texts. Each researcher examined the transcriptions, drew inferences, and categorized interview data into themes; words and phrases frequently used by participants were coded. Through coding, researchers were able to make inferences regarding the exonerees’ and their family members’ experiences. Figures 1.1 to 1.6 provide data on gender, race, age of false arrest, time spent falsely imprisoned, charges for wrongful convictions, and familial relationship to the exoneree. Drawing on the data collected from the interviews, further analyses will be addressed in the forthcoming chapters.

In Chapter 3, the nature and extent of wrongful conviction is discussed, including an overview of the major causes of wrongful conviction: eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, incentivized witnesses, official misconduct, and problematic forensic sciences and expert testimony. In addition, the incidence of wrongful convictions is raised, as well as the challenges encountered in establishing accurate numbers. This chapter provides a context for understanding the occurrence of wrongful convictions in the United States.

Chapter 4, written by guest authors Professor Earl Smith and Professor Angela Hattery, expands the concept of innocence and victimization beyond the experiences of the wrongly convicted and their families interviewed for this book and examines several racist and disturbing police practices that ensnare Black Americans, and especially Black men,...