Five stories of the wrongfully accused

“It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer.” —Benjamin Franklin, 1785

Franklin was not the first to express the principle that the wrongful imprisonment of the innocent is a worse crime than the failure to imprison the guilty. Nonetheless, it is one deeply ingrained in the collective understanding of right and wrong. And yet: there are times when crimes seem so heinous, our inherent biases are so prevailing, or a narrative takes the media by such a storm, that the pursuit of the guilty and justice for the victim become imperatives that can trample Franklin’s credo.

Here are five cases of people who were wrongly accused, what led to the accusations, and what they did to overcome them. Covering roughly a century of American history, each case is as unique as the individuals involved, and yet taken together they explore assumptions about race, gender, and power, and even how attempts to get beyond stereotypes and traditional assumptions can lead to a miscarriage of justice.

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The Scottsboro Boys

In 1931 a group of migrant workers—some Black, some white—got into a fight on a freight train traveling through the Southern United States. The Black workers forced the white workers off the train, but when the train stopped in Alabama, police hauled the Black workers, who were between the ages of 12 and 20, off the train and arrested them. Two white women who had been with the men who had been forced off the train said that they had been raped by the Black youths.

The nine Black youths barely escaped being lynched and were tried in Scottsboro, Alabama, three weeks after their arrest. Doctors examined the women who made the accusations and testified that they found no evidence of rape, but after three trials that lasted just days an all-white jury found all nine youths guilty. They were all sentenced to death, with the exception of the 12-year-old, Roy Wright. The case gained nationwide notoriety. The manner in which the case was handled, notably the facts that the accused had no legal representation until the day the trial began and that Black jurors had been intentionally excluded, drew claims that the convictions represented a grave legal wrong.

Over the course of the next few years, the case would find its way to the Supreme Court multiple times. In 1932, in the case of Powell v. Alabama, the nation’s high court overturned the convictions on the grounds of inadequate legal representation. The state of Alabama, however, retried and reconvicted the nine. In 1935, the Court ruled on two more of the Scottsboro Boys’ appeals, Norris v. Alabama and Patterson v. Alabama, issuing landmark decisions saying in both cases that the exclusion of Black jurors was a violation of the defendants’ due process rights.

In the end, five defendants had their convictions overturned, and the remaining four were ultimately pardoned, but not before all nine had collectively spent more than 100 years in prison.

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Malcolm X’s assassins

On February 21, 1965, the controversial and charismatic Black nationalist leader Malcolm X was shot and killed while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Talmadge Hayer, who would later change his name to Mujahid Abdul Halim, was shot in the leg and arrested at the scene. He was a member of the Nation of Islam, the group led by Elijah Muhammad, of whom Malcolm X had been a disciple before the two had a nasty and very public falling out. In the coming weeks, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, who would later be known as Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, respectively, were arrested and charged with the assassination. Both were also members of the Nation of Islam.

The three men were tried in 1966. When Halim testified, he confessed to being one of the shooters at the scene but denied knowing Aziz and Islam and declared them innocent. Despite the testimony and alibis that put them far from the assassination site, Aziz and Islam were convicted alongside Halim and sentenced to life in prison. In 1977 Halim again renewed his bid to clear the other two, signing an affidavit attesting to their innocence and naming four others as the shooters. In June 1985, more than 19 years after his conviction, Aziz was granted parole. Two years later, in 1987, Islam also won parole. Halim was freed on parole in 2010, 45 years after the assassination.

But it wasn’t until the publication of a book in 2011 and the airing of a documentary in 2020 that the case was officially reopened. In November 2021, after a nearly two-year investigation done by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Innocence Project, District Attorney Cyrus Vance released a stunning report that determined that law enforcement had intentionally withheld evidence that likely would have resulted in acquittals for Aziz and Islam. Vance concluded: “These men did not get the justice that they deserved.”

The news came too late for Islam, who had died in 2009. But Aziz was in court to hear his name being cleared. He addressed the court, noting that while he was pleased to be exonerated, it only affirmed what had been true all along:

I do not need this court, these prosecutors, or a piece of paper to tell me I am innocent.

The Central Park Five

On an April evening in 1989, a 28-year-old white investment banker went for a jog in New York City’s Central Park. What happened to her there was one of the most heinous and shocking crimes the city saw in the last part of the 20th century. Trisha Meili was brutally assaulted, raped, and left for dead in a ravine. She suffered a skull fracture and was in a coma for 12 days. Within days of the attack, five Black and brown teenagers, ages 14–16, were arrested. After hours of interrogation, they confessed and were charged in the attack.

Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, and Kevin Richardson quickly became known as the “Central Park Five.” They described how they were in the park for a night of “wilding,” which involved illegal behavior ranging from taking food from people in the park to injuring another jogger. But even as the media provided nonstop coverage of the crime, problems with the case emerged: some of the interrogations occurred without the teens’ parents present, and all five later recanted their confessions; their accounts of the attack were wildly inconsistent; and DNA collected at the scene didn’t match any of the teens. Still, the five were convicted in two trials in 1990 on charges including rape and attempted murder. They would each spend between 6 and 13 years in prison.

Then, in 2002, something remarkable happened: an incarcerated convicted murderer and serial rapist named Matias Reyes reached out to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He was the rapist in the Central Park jogger case, he said, describing how he, on that April night, had grabbed Meili as she ran and brutalized her. Reyes’s confession was born of pure coincidence: he happened to be in the same prison as Korey Wise. Reyes contacted the DA’s office when he realized that Wise was serving time for the crime Reyes had committed. Reyes’s admission led to the convictions of the Central Park Five being vacated in 2002. In 2014 the city paid the five a total of $41 million (roughly $1 million for each year they collectively wrongfully served).

They are now known as the “Exonerated Five,” and in 2023 Yusef Salaam was elected to the New York City Council.

The Duke Lacrosse team

In March 2006 three white Duke University lacrosse players were accused of the brutal rape of a Black college student who had been hired to perform as an exotic dancer at a team party. The case made national and global headlines and dominated cable news. A year later the attorney general of North Carolina declared the players innocent and the district attorney who brought the case a “rogue prosecutor.” The woman who leveled the accusation admitted in 2024 that she had made it up.

The case became something of a Rorschach test on privilege, race, sex, and power, one in which none of the principals emerged unscathed. On March 13, 2006, members of the nationally ranked Duke men’s lacrosse team held a party at a university-owned house that was located off campus. The team hired two women to act as strippers. One of the women was 27-year-old Crystal Mangum, a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically Black university in Durham. She left the party early, apparently intoxicated, and was the subject of racist taunts from players at the house.

She called the police and recounted a horrifying episode of being raped by multiple players in a bathroom of the house. The case almost immediately made headlines, and Durham county District Attorney Michael Nifong became the public face of the case, saying in a nationally televised press conference, “There’s no doubt in my mind that she was raped and assaulted at this location.” In a part of the country where the rape of Black women by white men had historically gone largely unpunished, there seemed to be a commitment not to allow history to repeat itself. Later that spring three Duke players—Reade W. Seligmann, David F. Evans, and Collin Finnerty—were indicted on charges of rape.

Problems with the case became evident almost immediately: Mangum’s story changed repeatedly; DNA did not match any of the team’s players; time-stamped photos seemed to provide the three accused players with an alibi; and a photo lineup conducted by police did not adhere to standard procedure. By January 2007, an embattled Nifong asked North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper to review the case. In April 2007, 13 months after the fateful party, Cooper cleared Seligmann, Evans, and Finnerty of all charges. He declined to charge Mangum for making a false report, saying, “She may actually believe the many different stories that she has been telling.” In June, Nifong was disbarred. In 2024 Mangum admitted she had made up the rape charge.

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin

In 1982 Joseph Bernardin was named the archbishop of Chicago; he would add the lofty title of “cardinal” the following year. Renowned for his soft-spoken, humble nature, he was nonetheless one of the most important and influential voices in the 20th-century Roman Catholic Church. He preached profoundly about the Church’s role in society, embracing issues including the rights of migrants, environmental justice, and anti-racism. However, Bernardin’s vision was seen as too progressive by many within the traditionally conservative church and opened divisions with those who accused him as being “soft” on abortion and other issues. In 1991, as allegations of sexual abuse by priests began to surface in the Chicago archdiocese and elsewhere, Bernardin formed a commission to investigate the charges in what he hoped would be a model for future investigations.

In November 1993 the church and Bernardin were rocked when Steven Cook, a former seminarian who had known Bernardin in the 1970s when he was the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, filed a lawsuit accusing Bernardin of sexual abuse. In an interview with CNN, Cook described the impact of the abuse, which he said he had recalled only recently through hypnosis therapy: “I don’t really know if you can put words to describe it, what that pain is like. It shatters your world, it shatters your soul, it shatters your life. [Bernardin] has to pay a price.”

Bernardin denied the charges adamantly: “I have never abused anyone, at any time and at any place. I can assure you that in all my life I’ve led a chaste, celibate life.”

Several months after filing the lawsuit, Cook withdrew it and recanted the allegations, saying, “I now realize that the memories which arose during and after hypnosis are unreliable.” Later that year, before Cook died of complications related to AIDS, Bernardin met with his accuser, forgave him, and prayed with him. Bernardin died of cancer in 1996, but in a posthumously published memoir he indicated that he believed a priest who had opposed some of his teachings had encouraged Cook to make the allegations.

Despite being wrongfully accused, Bernardin made clear that he thought charges of misconduct needed to be investigated.

In terms of the future, if there’s an accusation of sexual abuse against anyone—priest or otherwise—I think that that accusation has to be taken seriously. And I also think that in the final analysis, truth will win out, that justice will be done.