Steven A. James initially was caught up in this case at time when false arrests, wrongful convictions and wrongful imprisonment was at all time high in Massachusetts. In fact, Suffolk County during this period was 2nd in United States for wrongful convictions.
The Suffolk County DA at time was Newman Flanagan and Boston was rife with corruption at levels. This same corruption has been exposed time and time again in headlines of Boston Globe and The Boston Herald and has even been dramatized in major movies which romanticize the corruption in Boston.
Steven A. James is yet another victim of wide spread corruption in our judicial system. He has served 27 yrs for a crime he is innocent of. Steven has the always maintained his innocence and his sentence only reflects that he was unwilling to take a plea deal and admit to something he did not do.
Please take look this brief article for similar examples.
Blind spots
A spate of wrongful convictions has convinced Suffolk County DA Dan Conley and Boston Police commissioner Kathleen O’Toole to reform how the police use eyewitness evidence. While they’re at it,
they should reopen these three cases.BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
IF THERE’S ONE THING we all should have learned from the string of wrongful convictions recently come to light, it’s that you can’t always believe someone else’s eyes. Questionable or flat-out-wrong eyewitness-identification testimony led to Anthony Powell’s 1992 conviction for rape, and the murder convictions of Shawn Drumgold in 1989, Donnell Johnson in 1996, and Marlon Passley in 1995. All have been released — with apologies from Suffolk County district attorney Dan Conley in the first two cases and former Suffolk County DA Ralph Martin in the others — in the last five years.
Not every wrongful conviction is fault of eyewitnesses, of course. A jury found Stephan Cowans, freed this January, guilty of a 1997 police-officer shooting largely on the basis of an erroneous fingerprint match. But witnesses remain the most common problem, in Boston and elsewhere. The New York–based Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that takes on prisoner appeals in which DNA or other scientific tests can prove innocence, says that more than 80 percent of prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence since 1992 were originally convicted on mistaken eyewitness testimony. A University of Michigan study released Monday found that almost 90 percent of wrongful rape convictions and half of wrongful homicide convictions since 1989 included at least one eyewitness misidentification. The results of study suggest that thousands of incarcerated today may, in fact, be innocent.
FULL STORY HERE: http://parkerslaw.com/Site/Keyon_Sprinkle.html