3 cases tagged “wrongful conviction controversy”
Convicted: Masumi Hayashi (林 眞須美)
On a sweltering July evening in 1998, residents of a quiet Wakayama neighborhood lined up to ladle curry from a communal pot at their summer festival. Within hours, sixty-seven of them were fighting for their lives. Four never recovered: a local council president, his vice president, a ten-year-old boy, and a sixteen-year-old girl. Investigators would eventually determine the pot contained at least 130 grams of arsenic trioxide — enough poison to kill more than one hundred people. The suspect was a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four who had been seen loitering near the curry pots, alone, for over forty minutes. Before her arrest, a photograph captured her in her garden, smiling, hosing down a crowd of reporters. That image would follow her everywhere. Masumi Hayashi was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death on purely circumstantial evidence: no confession, no confirmed motive, no direct physical evidence. She has maintained her innocence ever since. Now sixty-three years old and still on death row, her case raises a question that haunts Japanese legal scholars: what if the evidence was never enough?
Convicted: Mary Elizabeth Surratt (née Jenkins; baptismal name Maria Eugenia Jenkins Surratt)
On July 7, 1865, in the sweltering heat of a Washington summer that pushed nearly 100 degrees, a middle-aged Catholic widow in a black bombazine dress was escorted to a wooden scaffold at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary. Moments later, Mary Elizabeth Surratt became the first woman ever executed by the United States federal government. She died for her alleged role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, convicted on the testimony of a self-serving tenant and a debt-ridden tavern keeper whose own freedom may have depended on what they said about her. Surratt never testified. She was not permitted to. Five of the nine military commissioners who condemned her signed a petition begging President Andrew Johnson to spare her life. He refused, later claiming he never saw it. Her son, who fled to the Vatican to escape justice, was eventually tried in a civilian court and walked free after the jury deadlocked. Her co-conspirator Lewis Powell, standing on his own gallows, said she was innocent. More than 150 years later, historians still argue about whether the United States government hanged a guilty woman, a scapegoat, or something more complicated than either.
Convicted: Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen
At 5:25 on a March morning in 1986, Joyce Cohen called 911 from her Coconut Grove mansion and told dispatchers that burglars had shot her millionaire husband four times in the head while he slept. Then she kept police waiting outside the house for more than eight hours. It was the first of many decisions that would define the rest of her life. The story of Joyce Cohen is a portrait of poverty survived and luxury squandered, of a woman who clawed her way from foster homes in Illinois to the highest rungs of Miami society, only to watch it all collapse in a single pre-dawn hour. What followed was a nearly three-year investigation, a sensational trial, a jailhouse informant who failed three polygraphs, and a lead detective who privately believed the whole prosecution theory was wrong. Joyce Cohen has maintained her innocence for nearly four decades. She is in her late seventies now, housed at Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida, with a parole board having pushed her release date to 2048. The mansion is gone. The Jaguars are gone. Stanley Cohen has been in the ground since 1986. And the full truth of what happened that night may never be known.
