On March 10, 2015, Angel Gonzalez was exonerated after serving over 20 years in prison for a rape that he did not commit.

In 1994, Mr. Gonzalez was misidentified as the attacker when police used a highly unreliable and suggestive identification procedure. After he was arrested, he was misled by police into signing a false confession. Despite having four alibi witnesses testify in his defense in court, Mr. Gonzalez was wrongly convicted of aggravated sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Although Mr. Gonzalez maintained his innocence from the beginning, it wasn’t until 2013 that he was finally able to prove his innocence through DNA testing. Today, he is a member of the Innocence Project’s Exoneree Advisory Council.

On April 4, 2011, Cornelius Dupree was exonerated after spending more than 30 years in prison for a 1979 rape and robbery he didn’t commit.

One week after the attack, Mr. Dupree, alongside Anthony Massingill, was stopped by police who claimed both men fit the general description of two other Black men who were suspected in a separate sexual assault case. After their photos were submitted for an identification lineup, Mr. Dupree and Mr. Massingill were misidentified as the attackers in the rape and robbery case. They were convicted in 1980, and Mr. Dupree was subsequently sentenced to 75 years in prison.

In 2010, DNA testing conclusively excluded both men as possible sources of DNA found on the survivor. The district attorney’s office agreed that the DNA evidence established Mr. Dupree’s evidence, and he was granted habeas corpus relief by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

My Story

Chris Fabricant is the director of strategic litigation (Joseph Flom Special Counsel) at the Innocence Project. In this role, he leads the Innocence Project’s strategic litigation department, whose attorneys develop and execute national litigation and public policy strategies to address the leading causes of wrongful conviction. 

Chris is one of the United States’s leading experts on forensic sciences and scientific litigation. Prior to joining the Innocence Project, he was a longtime public defender and law professor. He frequently serves as a public speaker on law reform issues, and is widely published in both legal scholarship and in mainstream media. In his new book, Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, Chris examines the role that faulty scientific evidence has in continuing and strengthening an unjust and racial biased criminal legal system.

On January 30, 2018, Malcolm Alexander was exonerated in Louisiana of a 1979 rape he did not commit. A reinvestigation by the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office, the Innocence Project, and the Innocence Project New Orleans led to DNA testing of hair evidence that proved his innocence.

Mr. Alexander was wrongly convicted in 1980 and sentenced to life without parole largely based on eyewitness misidentification and an inadequate defense. He subsequently served 38 years in prison before he was released.

On Aug. 21, 2002, Marvin Lamont Anderson became the 99th person in the U.S. to be exonerated as a result of post-conviction DNA testing. Mr. Anderson was only 18 years old when he was convicted in 1982 of robbery, sodomy, abduction, and rape in Virginia. His conviction largely rested on eyewitness misidentification, and he was sentenced to 210 years in prison.

In 2001, the Innocence Project, in partnership with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, won access to DNA testing, the results of which excluded Mr. Anderson as the attacker and instead matched two other individuals. In 2002, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner granted Mr. Anderson, who had spent 20 years in prison, a full pardon.

Following his exoneration, Mr. Anderson served as chief of the Hanover, Virginia Fire Department, where he oversaw a team of 30 people. He is currently on the Innocence Project’s board of directors.

My Story

On Dec. 16, 2020, Termaine Hicks was freed from a Pennsylvania prison after his wrongful conviction for a 2001 rape was vacated.

In 2001, Mr. Hicks was walking home when he heard a woman screaming. He found her badly beaten and attempted to call 911 when the police arrived and mistook him for the attacker. Officers shot him three times in the back before they realized their mistake. They then conspired to cover it up and falsely testified that Mr. Hicks had lunged at them with a gun. Based on this testimony, Mr. Hicks was convicted in 2002 of rape, aggravated assault, possessing an instrument of crime, and terroristic threats.

In 2015, Mr. Hicks filed a petition for post-conviction DNA testing on the evidence. Separately, in 2018, his attorneys filed a petition for post-conviction relief, stating that pathology reports and other evidence revealed that he had been shot from behind three times. Two years later, the district attorney’s conviction integrity unit asked a court to vacate Mr. Hicks’ conviction.

Mr. Hicks, an aspiring playwright, is now a member of the Innocence Project’s Exoneree Advisory Council.

Vanessa joined the organization in 2000 as its first staff attorney, and has helped pioneer the model of post-conviction DNA litigation used nationwide to exonerate wrongfully convicted persons. She is a nationally recognized expert on wrongful convictions and the use of DNA to establish innocence. In 2012, she contributed to the National Institute of Justice’s “DNA for the Defense Bar,” a report for criminal defense attorneys on understanding and applying DNA science in the courtroom.