They're out of prison, but still fighting to prove their innocence: 'I feel like I'm not free'
Eric FerkenhoffOn April 23, Michael Politte is set to walk out of prison, three months after winning parole and nearly 24 years after he was locked away for murdering his mother.
Like many people across the U.S. released after serving their sentences, Politte, from the small Missouri town of Hopewell, will be in a legal limbo: out of prison but not exonerated.
"He's not home free by any means," said his attorney, Megan Crane of the MacArthur Justice Center, adding, "The main event for him was never parole."
Politte has maintained for decades that he was wrongly accused and convicted of his mother's murder. He plans to continue his fight when he gets out of prison.
The USA TODAY Network reached out to innocence projects around the country, requesting examples of paroled people who, though freed from prison, still are fighting for exoneration. Lawyers offered up dozens of cases.
They ranged from 18-year sentences for gas station robberies to life and sometimes death sentences for rape and murder. In all of the cases taken up by innocence projects,attorneys had found something amiss about the arrests, charging and prosecution of their clients, or other factors that point to their innocence.
It is unclear how many more people may be out of prison but still seeking to clear their records. The National Registry of Exonerations counts nearly 3,000 exonerations since 1989, with the wrongfully convicted having collectively spent some 26,500 years locked up before they were declared innocent. But there is no good data on how many others are on parole, hoping to one day be cleared.
Experts believe from 2% to 10% of the 2.1 million incarcerated Americans are innocent, but many never take up the intense fight for exoneration, according to National Registry of Exonerations senior researcher Maurice Possley.
"You see how long it takes to win one of these battles," he said. "And once you're free, it takes some real determination and perseverance to try to get rid of all the handcuffs that still exist post-release or even post-parole."
Politte told the USA Today Network in a phone interview from the Jefferson City Correctional Center that he will continue to fight for his exoneration once he's outside the prison walls.
“I have changed the narrative of what happened to my mother through determination and grit,“ he said. “Unless the United States Supreme Court says ‘I can’t help you,’ it’s going to be a fight.”
Here is his story and those of two other people seeking to clear their names.
Convicted when he was 14 years old, Michael Politte is still fighting at 37
Politte, now 37, was 14 when he was charged with setting his mother, Rita Politte, ablaze and watching her die in December 1998. The main physical evidence against him at the 2002 trial, that gasoline was the accelerant, was faulty — something Missouri officials now acknowledge.
The only other evidence against him was testimony about official impressions that Politte, just a teenager, didn’t seem remorseful when confronted about the fire.
The Missouri Attorney General's Office has made a procedural argument that state law doesn't allow the Missouri Supreme Court to review Politte's claims. The office also alleges that he was a troubled child and known firebug who confessed to the killing.
But the state Supreme Court did not summarily deny Politte's appeal seeking his exoneration last October, as the state was seeking. The non-denial was a win for Politte, and a ruling on whether to take the case could, at the earliest, come from the court sometime in March.
If the court does take the case, three scenarios could play out for the now-37-year-old:
- The court could accept his arguments and vacate the conviction — which is very rare.
- The court could begin a series of hearings in which the case would be effectively argued anew, this time allowing evidence that the supposed gasoline found on Politte's shoes the morning of the fire was actually residue of chemicals from the sneaker manufacturer.
- The court could simply deny the petition, which Politte would then appeal in federal court.
Paroled after a U.S. Supreme Court decision but Derrick Shields feels like he's 'not free'
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs that a mandatory life sentence without parole, even for homicide, was an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment for a minor.
Derrick Shields was 14 when he was charged along with two cousins, Travis Booker, 15, and Kuntrell Jackson, also 14 and the namesake of Supreme Court case, in the 1999 killing of video store clerk Laurie Troup.
Seven years after the court's decisions, Shields got a parole hearing because of the ruling. He was paroled after being locked away for 18 years and went home to Blytheville, Arkansas — the town of 15,000 where the murder occurred.
Still, even now that he's been paroled, Shields said he remains haunted by the high court's 2012 ruling. Instead of clearing him, the court wrote: "When Troup threatened to call the police, Shields shot and killed her."
"It is very frustrating, it's hard," Shields, now 36, told the USA TODAY Network. "I feel like I can't do anything. I feel like I'm not free. They see me as I'm not free. You see, with a case like mine, it's like everybody knows, you stand out."
More:Supreme Court considers reprieve for kids who kill
According to court records, the killing occurred after the three boys chatted at the Chickasaw Courts housing project in Blytheville about committing a robbery, then drove around looking for a target.
Shields allegedly had a sawed-off shotgun tucked in his coat when the boys pulled up to video store Movie Magic. They confronted Troup, the 28-year-old clerk, and demanded money, according to court records. When Troup threatened to call police, the records allege, Shields shot her in the face.
Not a dime was taken.
A short time later, Shields was picked up on another charge. When police asked Shields about the crime during several interrogations, he ultimately confessed — after police promised him leniency and threatened to give Shields' brother with the death penalty, his lawyers said. Shields told investigators that Jackson was the shooter. But when police arrested Jackson, he identified Shields as the shooter.
Shields' attorney, Steven Drizin, maintains Shields' statement to police never fit the facts of the case and that Shields was the only one with a tight alibi: that he was having a phone meeting with a parole officer at the time of the murder.
Drizin, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, whose team includes Crane, said they got statements from Booker that, if investigators compared them with Shields', would reveal inconsistencies that show Shields was not involved in the killing.
Another frustration for Drizin is what happened before the trial in 2003: Jackson's mother walked into the local police station and declared Shields had nothing to do with Troup's killing.
This statement, documented in initial police reports, has never been heard in a court, Drizin and Crane said.
“I've never been involved in a case in my life where, before trial, a co-defendant’s mother gets up, walks into a police station and says, ’My son, who's on trial for his life, told me that Derrick is innocent'…and that fact never sees the light of day, is never used in court," Drizin said. "It's never acted on by the prosecution. It's never acted on by the police department. And as a result, we believe the wrong person was convicted of this crime.
"Think about…the heroism of that mother,' he said. "And nothing happened as a result."
An appeal failed in federal district court because Shields' previous attorney didn't notify him he only had 60 days to file a post-conviction motion to revisit the case, as required under Arkansas law.
"Derrick's legal team is now seeking the Hail Mary option of an application for a certificate of appealability," Crane said — that is, asking another court to hear Shields' appeal because it was wrongfully denied.
"(Shields) is stuck in this legal limbo," Drizin said, "having to try to navigate a world that believes him guilty and is ready to crush him the first sign he makes a mistake."
More:Should police be allowed to lie to minors to get confessions? Some states are banning the practice.
Johnetta Carr went from a 16-year-old high school graduate to a convicted murderer
A whiz in school, according to her attorneys, Johnetta Carr graduated from high school at 16 in 2006 and was to Sullivan University in Louisville, Kentucky, to become a paralegal.
But before she got to college she was arrested, convicted and sentenced, along with two other teenagers, for tying up, stabbing, and strangling a 36-year-old cab driver, Planes Adolphe, with whom Carr had a romantic relationship.
There were early red flags in the case, said Suzanne Hopf of the Kentucky Innocence Project and Amy Staples, a lawyer with Loevy & Loevy. Hopf is fighting for Carr’s exoneration while Staples is suing Louisville and Jefferson County authorities in federal court for misconduct.
"There were so many facts that didn't fit," Hopf said.
Consider the interrogation, Carr said in an interview.
"I'm 16 years old, and my interrogation went 11 1/2 hours with no parents, guardian or counsel," said Carr, now 33 and out of prison. "It's been like a living a death penalty. It's been a nightmare I feel like I cannot wake up from, with the lack of accountability.”
Police, the city and the county argue the federal cases, which allege Carr was framed, should be dismissed.
Carr's was not among DNA found on the shipping tape used to bind Adolphe and television cord used to strangle him. And Hopf said the theory of the case — that Adolphe "had been carried down several flights of stairs … and left to die in the parking lot" — "made absolutely no sense that these three kids did this."
Carr and her attorneys said that at the time of the trial, she was unaware of the DNA or other evidence that might have cleared her.
While in custody, investigators threatened her co-defendant with the death penalty if Carr didn’t take a plea, according to her appeal and complaint in federal court. Her attorneys say a prison snitch who put the murder on Carr later recanted the statement, which her attorneys argue was fabricated by investigators to frame Carr while ignoring other potential suspects.
More:Woman pardoned by former Gov. Matt Bevin says Louisville police framed her in murder
Faced with a potential death sentence for her co-defendant, Carr accepted an Alford plea, in which she acknowledged there was enough evidence to result in her conviction on the charges but did not admit guilt. She was sentenced to 20 years.
"Johnetta was coerced into taking that plea," Staples said. "This was part of the misconduct.”
Carr, whose attorneys say she was a model inmate, was paroled in 2009. Ten years later, in 2019, she won a pardon from then-Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin. Bevin wrote of Carr: “God clearly has His hand on her.”
Still, she's not entirely free.
"The problem is, until her record is expunged, you're not cleared," Hopf said. "And you can't go back to court and do an expungement for five years in Kentucky."
Indeed, the defense argues in the civil case that, in Kentucky, a pardon does not invalidate a conviction.
Working to rebuild their lives as post-prison felons amid long fight with innocence project
When an innocence project takes a case, it’s just the start of a long process that may never bring a ruling of actual innocence.
And without exoneration, restrictions follow those convicted even after they're paroled, complicating efforts to get a job, vote, find housing and reintegrate in society.
"The hardships are incredible. You have no employment. …What do you do, especially in an information-age economy?" Hopf said, adding that some have been locked up so long that they "don't even know how to use a cellphone."
All three — Pollitte, Shields and Carr — have an advantage: their cases caught the attention of Innocence projects. Many more people convicted in flawed cases may be in the same situation, but without the benefit of free legal representation in their quest to be cleared.
Still fighting his conviction, Politte is planning to live with a sister after his release, and maybe get into sales. But he also cherishes working with his hands, something he has done in a furniture factory while in prison, working for the Missouri Department of Labor in a furniture factory.
Politte said he will not harbor resentments but rather look to honor his mother by fighting for his innocence and that of others.
”I feel like my mom didn’t die in vain,“ he said. “If this is what it had to be for me to affect the world in a positive way, then my mom didn’t die for nothing. I think she’ll be proud.”
Nor will Carr give up on her dreams of becoming a paralegal and fixing a broken criminal justice system.
”I’ll be a voice,” she said, “not only to help people that have already been wrongfully convicted, but to get the issues underlying it corrected. We know it’ll keep happening.“
Shields wants to make his son, just five months old, proud.
But Shields also said the truth must come out for the Troup family.
”I need to prove I didn’t do this,” he said, “so her family knows I’m innocent. It’s the victims. That’s really important.”
Eric Ferkenhoff is the Midwest Criminal Justice Reporter for USA Today Network. He's on Twitter @EricFerk.