Who was found guilty of killing 22 villagers and originally given a life sentence but was released after a ruling by federal judge found their trial has been prejudiced by pre-trail publicity?
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My Lai Massacre The Mỹ Lai Massacre (Vietnamese: "Thảm sát Mỹ Lai" , ] ; , , or ) was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. It was committed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served only three and a half years under house arrest.
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William Calley William Laws Calley Jr. (born June 8, 1943) is a former United States Army officer convicted by court-martial of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. While not technically exonerated, after three and a half years of house arrest, Calley was released after a ruling by federal judge J. Robert Elliott who found that Calley's trial had been prejudiced by pre-trial publicity, denial of subpoenas of certain defense witnesses, refusal of the United States House of Representatives to release testimony taken in executive session of its My Lai investigation, and inadequate notice of the charges. His initial conviction faced widespread public opposition both due to the campaign circumstances of civilian embedded Viet Cong, and due to Calley being singled out as the sole convicted officer in relation to the massacre.
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Spring Creek raid The Spring Creek raid, also known as the Tensleep Murders or the Tensleep Raid, occurred in 1909 and was the last serious conflict during the Sheep Wars in Wyoming, as well as the deadliest sheep raid in the state's history. On the night of April 2, the sheepherder Joe Allemand and four of his associates were encamped along Spring Creek, near the town of Ten Sleep, when a group of seven masked cattlemen attacked them. It remains uncertain as to whether or not an exchange of gunfire took place between the two parties, but evidence suggests that Allemand and two of his men were executed while the remaining two escaped unharmed. Two sheep wagons were also destroyed by fire and about two dozen head of sheep were shot to death. Seven men were arrested for the crime, two of whom turned state's evidence and were acquitted. The rest were found guilty and sent to prison for sentences ranging from three years to life in prison. The conviction of the Tensleep murderers effectively put an end to the killings on the open range and exemplified the arrival of law and order in a region that still retained its rugged frontier environment after the end of the 19th century. Although there continued to be sheep raids in Wyoming into the 1910s, there were no more deaths.
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John Giuca John Giuca (born October 1983) is an American man who was convicted on a charge of second-degree felony murder in the death of 19-year-old Mark Fisher in October, 2003. Giuca was arrested a year after the murder, he was found guilty along with trigger-man Antonio Russo; both were given a sentence of 25 years to life.
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Kandahar massacre The Kandahar massacre, more precisely identified as the Panjwai massacre, occurred in the early hours of 11 March 2012, when United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales murdered sixteen civilians and wounded six others in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Nine of his victims were children, and eleven of the dead were from the same family. Some of the corpses were partially burned. Bales was taken into custody later that morning when he told authorities, "I did it". On 23 August 2013, a jury at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Fort Lewis, Washington sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
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Richard Ramirez Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez, known as Richard Ramirez (February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), was an American serial killer, rapist, and burglar. His highly publicized home invasion crime spree terrorized the residents of the greater Los Angeles area, and later the residents of the San Francisco area, from June 1984 until August 1985. Prior to his capture, Ramirez was dubbed the "Night Stalker" by the news media. He used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a hammer. Ramirez, who was an avowed Satanist, never expressed any remorse for his crimes. The judge who upheld his thirteen death sentences remarked that Ramirez's deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding". Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution on California's death row.
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Peter Manuel Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel (13 March 1927 – 11 July 1958) was an American-Scottish serial killer who was convicted of murdering a total of seven people across Lanarkshire and southern Scotland between 1956 and his arrest in January 1958, and is believed to have murdered two more, nine in all. Prior to his arrest, the media nicknamed the unidentified killer "the Beast of Birkenshaw". Manuel was hanged at Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison; he was one of the last prisoners to die on the Barlinnie gallows.
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David Carpenter David Joseph Carpenter (born May 6, 1930), a.k.a. the Trailside Killer, is an American serial killer known for stalking and murdering his victims in State Parks in California. Carpenter killed several people on hiking trails near San Francisco, California. Carpenter killed at least 10 people, with one attempted victim, Steven Haertle, surviving. Carpenter used a .38 caliber handgun in all but one of the killings, with a .44 caliber handgun being used in the killing of Edna Kane on Mount Tamalpais.
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Utah prisoner of war massacre The Utah prisoner of war massacre (headlined by "Time" as Midnight Massacre) occurred just after midnight on July 8, 1945, when an American soldier, Private Clarence V. Bertucci, killed nine German prisoners of war and wounded twenty others at a camp in Salina, Utah. It is remembered for being "the worst massacre at a POW camp in U.S. history," and the ensuing conviction of Bertucci made him one of only three American soldiers prosecuted during World War II for killing Axis prisoners. It was also notable for having occurred two months after the German surrender and the end of the war in Europe.
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Machal Lalung Machal Lalung was from Tiwa (Lalung) tribe of Assam from the village of Khalagaon (now Silchang) in Morigaon, Assam, who spent 54 years in an Indian jail without facing trial. He was arrested on the charges of "causing grievous harm" in 1951, and transferred to a psychiatric institution in Tezpur, where he was forgotten. In 1967, the doctors certified him as fit, and he was moved to a jail in Guwahati, where he spent nearly four decades. He was released in 2005, after the local human rights groups brought his case to the attention of the National Human Rights Commission of India. The Supreme Court of India ordered the Government of Assam to compensate him and provide him a monthly assistance amount. Lalung died in 2007.
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Walter Irvin Walter Lee Irvin was born in Lake County, Florida. He served in the United States Army during World War II. In 1949, he and three other black men (Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, and Samuel Shepherd) were accused of raping a young white woman named Norma Padgett in Groveland, Florida. Newspapers called them the Groveland Four or the Groveland Boys. He was tried twice, the second time after the United States Supreme Court ordered a retrial. He was convicted both times and sentenced to death. In 1955, Florida Governor LeRoy Collins commuted his sentence to life, as he was not convinced of Irvin's guilt. In 1968 he was paroled from prison.
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Alton Coleman Alton Coleman (November 6, 1955 – April 26, 2002) was an American serial killer, along with accomplice Debra Brown, who committed a crime spree across six states in the Midwest where 8 people were murdered between May and July 1984. Coleman, who received death sentences from three states, was executed by the state of Ohio in 2002.
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Trial of Dylann Roof United States v. Roof (officially the United States of America v. Dylann Storm Roof) was a 2017 federal trial involving Dylann Roof and his role in the Charleston church shooting. Five days after the shooting, Roof was indicted on 33 federal charges, including 12 counts of committing a hate crime against black victims. On May 24, 2016, the Justice Department announced Roof would face the death penalty. As he was already facing the death penalty in his state trial, Roof became the first person in U.S. history to face both a federal and state death penalty at the same time.
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Darryl Hunt Darryl Hunt (February 24, 1965 – March 13, 2016) was an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted for the rape and the murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white newspaper copy editor, and sentenced to life in prison. After being convicted in that case, Hunt was tried in 1987 for the 1983 murder of Arthur Wilson, a 57-year-old black man of Winston-Salem. Both convictions overturned on appeal in 1989. Hunt was tried again in the Wilson case in 1990; he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He was tried again on the Sykes charges in 1991; he was convicted.
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Rufe Persful Rufe Persful (May 25, 1906 – May 16, 1991) was an American criminal, convicted for murder, kidnapping and robbery. He was considered one of the most dangerous criminals of his era by the authorities. Convicted with the murder and robbery of an elderly man at the age of 18, he was sentenced to 15 years in Arkansas State Penitentiary, but unlike a standard prison, it involved farm labour. He was given the task of shooting fellow inmates with a shotgun if they attempted to escape. He killed and disabled many prisoners during his time at the Arkansas Penitentiary, punctuated by periods of parole as a reward for his prison protection, and then re-offending and being sent back to resume his role.
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Tom Francis Collins Tom Francis Collins (1886–1907) was an English drifter who was convicted and hanged for murder in Albert County, New Brunswick in 1907. The events of the murder and trials resulted in several legal firsts in Canada.
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Michael Scanlon Michael Scanlon, a.k.a. "Sean Scanlon", is a former communications director for Rep. Tom DeLay, lobbyist, and public relations executive who has pleaded guilty to corruption charges related to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. He is currently assisting in the investigation of his former partners Abramoff, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed by separate state and federal grand jury investigations related to the defrauding of American Indian tribes and corruption of public officials. In addition to the allegation of dishonest dealing arising from the consulting contracts themselves, Abramoff and Scanlon are accused of illegally giving favors to senior Republicans Tom DeLay, Conrad Burns, John Doolittle and Bob Ney. In 2005 Scanlon pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress and other public officials. On February 11, 2011, he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison and 300 hours of community service.
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Clarence Elkins Clarence Arnold Elkins Sr. (born 1963) is an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, Melinda Elkins's mother, and the rape and assault of his niece, Brooke. He was convicted solely on the basis of testimony of his 6-year-old niece who testified that Elkins was the perpetrator.
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David Camm David Ray Camm (born March 23, 1964) is a former state trooper who was acquitted and released in 2013 after his third trial on charges of murdering his wife, Kimberly, and children, Brad, 7, and Jill, 5, at their Georgetown, Indiana home on September 28, 2000. He had been found guilty in two earlier trials, but these verdicts were overturned on appeal. Camm now works as a case coordinator for a non-profit wrongful conviction advocacy organization called Investigating Innocence that provides criminal defense investigations for inmates.
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Susan Smith Susan Leigh Vaughan-Smith (born September 26, 1971) is an American convict who was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Born in Union, South Carolina, she is a former student of the University of South Carolina Union.. On July 22, 1995, she was convicted of the drowning deaths of her two sons, three-year-old Michael Daniel Smith, and 14-month-old Alexander Tyler Smith.
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Terry Nichols Terry Lynn Nichols (born April 1, 1955) is an American who was convicted of being an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing. Prior to his incarceration, he held a variety of short-term jobs, working as a farmer, grain elevator manager, real estate salesman and ranch hand. He met his future conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, during a brief stint in the U.S. Army, which ended in 1989 when he requested a hardship discharge after less than one year of service. In 1994 and 1995, he conspired with McVeigh in the planning and preparation of the Oklahoma City bombing – the truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on April 19, 1995. The bombing claimed the lives of 168 people.
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Leonard Peltier Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is a Native American activist, a citizen of the Anishinabe & Dakota/Lakota Nations, and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first-degree murder in the shooting of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents during a 1975 conflict on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.