Location

Defendant(s)

Date of Alleged Crime

Michael Dirago was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend in Burlington County.  However, the body was not found there and there is little reason to believe that the murder occurred in Burlington County.  (See Pennsylvania - Bucks County - Michael Dirago)  [3/08]

William Allison MacFarland, also known as “Bill,” took cyanide home from the plant where he worked.  He used it to make a solution of the poison for his wife, who had used it to clean her jewelry and silverware. Bill explained he had taken an almost empty bromide bottle and poured the contents into another bromide bottle, which was almost full. He then funneled the poison solution into the now empty bromide bottle. To avoid any possible confusion, he affixed a poison label on the bromide bottle containing the cyanide. Bill then placed both bottles on a bathroom shelf.

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Earl Berryman and Michael Bunch were convicted of a 1983 rape.  Bunch later died of illness in prison.  U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise expressed "very serious doubt" that Berryman was involved in the crime.  A Centurion Ministries investigation showed that the lead police investigator in the case also had grave doubts about the victim's identification of Berryman.

The victim initially identified Berryman and Bunch from a mug book labeled “B,” which contained photographs of all individuals with names beginning with that letter.  The victim had earlier reviewed the “A” book and was told by police that, unless she could identify the suspects quickly, she would have to look through mug books for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, each containing more than 150 pictures.  The record also shows that she gave vastly different physical descriptions of her assailants on three separate occasions, all of which varied substantially from Berryman's and Bunch’s actual physical features.  (NACDL) (CM)  [7/05]

Vincent James Landano was convicted of the murder of Police Officer John Snow.  On Aug. 13, 1976, two gunmen robbed the Hi-Way Check Cashing Service in Kearny.  One went inside, while the other waited in a getaway car.  As the robbery was in progress, John Snow, a Newark police officer, arrived in his patrol car with an attaché case containing $46,000 to be delivered to the business.  Before Snow could get out of his car, the outside gunman walked up to the patrol car and shot Snow at point-blank range.  The gunman then took the attaché case and got into his car, while the the other gunman left the check-cashing service with a cash drawer containing about $6,000.  This gunman put the drawer on the roof of the car and jumped into the back seat.  The car sped away leaving $6,000 fluttering in the air behind it.

A man arrested for the crime, Allen Rollo, admitted being the inside gunman, and identified Landano as his partner, the one who shot Snow.  Centurion Ministries discovered a hidden police report in which the only eyewitness to the murder identified another man as the shooter.  When the case was retried, the jury deliberated for less than an hour and acquitted Landano in 1989.  Jurors later celebrated with him at a victory party.  (NY Times) (CM)  [4/08]

Ralph Cooper, 24, Collis English, 23, McKinlay Forrest, 35, John McKenzie, 24, James Thorpe, 34, and Horace Wilson, 37, all blacks, were convicted by an all white jury of the murder of William Horner, an elderly white shopkeeper.  All were sentenced to death.  Horner died after being hit on the head with a soda bottle.  Horner's wife, could not agree on how many men were actually involved with the attack, only that it was two to four light-skinned blacks in their teens.

Five of the six arrested signed inconsistent confessions, which were obtained by police coercion.  All six had solid alibis and repudiated the confessions.  The police refused to say whose fingerprints they found on the bottle.  Some of the defendants were represented by NAACP attorneys, one of who was Thurgood Marshall, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.  During appeals of the convictions, trumped-up evidence was revealed and the Trenton medical examiner was found guilty of perjury.  During a third trial in 1951, after an intervening mistrial, all defendants except English and Cooper were acquitted.  The convictions of the latter two were overturned in 1952, and they were never retried.  The Communist Daily Worker called the Trenton Six proceedings, “a northern Scottsboro case.”

George Parker was convicted of aggravated manslaughter for the shooting death of Donna Lynn Smith, 25.  Smith's body was found in Allaire State Park in Howell Township.  Smith had gone to the park with Parker, Pamela Pope, Carol Hancock, and James Covington.  Hancock was Pope's sister, while Covington was Parker's brother.  According to an appellate court, Pope, then age 29, believed that Smith had broken her nephew's arm and she wanted Parker to beat Smith.  However, Pope took Parker's gun and shot Smith twice, killing her.

Parker at first confessed to the crime, but he recanted it at trial saying he confessed because he loved Pope’s two children and thought Pope was pregnant with his child.  Pope and Hancock denied being at park at the time of the shooting.  Covington did not witness the shooting because he was asleep in the car at the time.  Parker was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Pope was later convicted of Smith's murder as well as committing perjury at Parker's trial.  Hancock was also convicted of perjury.  Parker's conviction was overturned in 1986 and he was freed on bail.  It is doubtful that he will be retried as the state essentially conceded that his confession was false.  (NY Times) (MOJIPCC)  [7/09]

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a contender for middleweight boxing title of the world, was convicted of a triple homicide.  His acquaintance, John Artis, was also convicted.  In 1974, while in jail, Carter published a book entitled The Sixteenth Round, From No. 1 Contender to #45472.  The book was discovered by Bob Dylan, who made Carter a folk hero with the release of the song "Hurricane" and led to a public outcry that was largely responsible for his retrial in 1976.  Carter was also supported by Coretta Scott King, Muhammad Ali, Joan Baez, and Bobby Seale as well as by some journalists and lawyers.

In a climate of racial tension, Carter was alleged to have killed white people to avenge the death of a black man who had been killed by a white man that same night in Paterson, NJ.  The triple homicide occurred at Bob's Lafayette Grill at 18th and Lafayette Sts.  Against evidence, Carter was reconvicted in 1976, in part because a first trial witness, who recanted his testimony, recanted his recantation and testified again.  Later Carter's conviction was overturned because Judge H. Lee Sarokin declared that both of Carter's two previous convictions had been based on "racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure."  Carter was freed in 1985, but it took another three years for charges to be completely dismissed.  His co-defendant, John Artis, was paroled in 1981.  Carter later headed a Toronto-based lobbying group, AIDWYC, the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.  (JD01)  [6/05]