Author Archives: Mark Godsey

From Expatica.com:

A French court Tuesday ordered nearly 800,000 euros to be paid in compensation to a former farm worker who spent more than seven years in prison after being falsely convicted of child rape.

Loic Secher, 51, is only the seventh person to have a wrongful conviction overturned in France since 1945. He had been demanding 2.4 million euros ($3 million) in damages.

Secher had spent seven years and three months in prison after a 14-year-old girl accused him of raping her. He was sentenced in 2003 to 16 years in jail.

The alleged victim retracted her accusation in 2008 and Secher was acquitted two years later, emerging from prison in April 2010.

His lawyers said he suffered violence at the hands of his fellow prisoners and had attempted suicide.

The court in the northwestern city of Rennes also ordered Secher’s mother to be paid 50,000 euros in damages and awarded a sum of 30,000 euros to each of his three siblings.

Secher, who had consistently proclaimed his innocence, has said he felt “destroyed” and “ruined” by his time in prison.

“There can be no price put on compensation for what he went through,” said Jean-Pierre Chesne, who headed a group seeking Secher’s acquittal.

Raymond Towler as wedding officiant…

Having the opportunity to work on innocence cases in law school is often a life-changing experience for many law students.  Ohio Innocence Project student Hilly McGahan and her boyfriend Jacob Baynham got the opportunity to know exoneree Raymond Towler during Hilly’s tenure with OIP, resulting in Jacob, a writer, publishing an extensive piece about Towler’s wrongful conviction in Cincinnati Magazine and Reader’s Digest.

This month, Towler performed the wedding ceremony for Hilly and Jacob in Montana.  Here is what Jacob wrote for Cincinnati Magazine about that experience:

The day after my wife and I got engaged, we started thinking out loud about what our wedding might look like. Cheap and simple, we agreed. Low-stress. The venue would be the backyard gardens of Hilly’s childhood home in Western Montana, the home in which she was born. The guest list would be long—Hilly comes from a big family in a small town—and we thought about making it a potluck. There should be ample beer and food, we thought: 65 percent party, 35 percent wedding.

Then Hilly turned to me and said, “I know who I want to marry us. Ray.”

She had met Raymond Towler through her work with the Ohio Innocence Project and the University of Cincinnati College of Law. She joined OIP just after Towler was released from prison, having served almost 29 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Towler came down from Cleveland to speak to the students working with OIP, and Hilly came home inspired. Hearing her retell it, I was too. I pitched the story to Cincinnati Magazineand started writing a feature article. The story let me spend time with Towler. We sat and talked at Coffee Emporium. We walked around downtown. And we saw live jazz at the Blue Wisp. It struck me that despite the injustice that had digested the better part of his adult life, Towler had no bitterness inside him. After almost three decades behind bars, he walked out one of the most enlightened men I’ve ever met.

It was a beautiful idea. Towler was someone who had come into our lives while we were together. His story tied together Hilly’s legal aspirations and the reason I became a journalist. But more important, he represented to us the power of the human spirit to overcome great suffering with the words Towler now uses to close his e-mails: peace and love.

We put the question to Towler via e-mail when we returned to Cincinnati. “WOW,” he replied. “This is truly a first in my life. And such a great honor.” He didn’t say yes immediately, though. He asked for time to think. A month later he wrote again. “Yes I will do it for you,” he said. “There was not a single reason I could think of to say no. I could not use my nerves as a legit reason.”

So months later, on Sept. 1, Towler and his girlfriend, Brenda, were with us, in those backyard gardens in Western Montana, surrounded by our friends and family. Towler stood on a platform looking wise in his glasses and short, whitening beard. I walked up the aisle to join him, and several minutes later, so did Hilly. I don’t know if the ceremony was short or long—it’s a blur to me now—but by the end of it, Hilly and I realized our math had been wrong. Our wedding was 65 percent ceremony, and 35 percent party. Because it was the ceremony, with the immeasurable hope, grace, and love that Towler brought to it, that made that day the best in our lives.—Jacob Baynham  

I blogged last week about the Ohio Innocence Project’s victory in the 6th Circuit court of appeals in the Al Cleveland case.  Here’s a great story about the case written by a reporter who got to know Al over the years:

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The phone on my desk rang, and a deep, gruff voice came on the line.

The private investigator with a Chicago accent so thick you could cut it with a knife wanted to talk about the murder conviction of Lorain’s Alfred Cleveland.

I knew Cleveland. I’d hired him to help illustrate a graphic novel that I wrote. Cleveland did the work quickly and expertly — from a cell in the Mansfield prison.

I told Cleveland our relationship was strictly artist and writer, that I would not report his story in the newspaper, even though he professed his innocence. I started to say that to the guy on the phone. He had other ideas.

“Shut up,” he growled.

I did.

“My name is Paul Ciolino,” he said. “Google me. I’ll wait.”

My jaw dropped. I found story after story about how this detective’s work got five men off Illinois death row who were wrongfully convicted, and how he worked with the celebrated “Innocence Project.”

This was someone to listen to. What he said in this 2006 call made me delve into Cleveland’s case and follow leads that Ciolino had uncovered, including an interview with the witness whose testimony put Cleveland behind bars. Testimony the witness said he made up.

It led to other questions about whether Cleveland was even in Lorain the night of the murder.

Last week a federal appeals court, citing the same issues I found, ordered a lower-court judge to reconsider Cleveland’s request for a new trial. The judges suggest Cleveland could be acquitted. The prison artist might soon be a free man.

My first contact with Cleveland, now 43, was in 2002. He sent me copies of his artwork after reading my weekly comic book column in The Plain Dealer. The art was impressive.

Even more impressive was that Cleveland honed his talent in his cell in the Richland Correctional Institution, where he has been serving a life sentence for the murder of a Lorain prostitute in 1991. He and three other men were convicted of the crime in 1996.

Through letters and occasional telephone conversations, I encouraged Cleveland to keep drawing and painting. Over the next few years, he sent copies of other works.

I mailed him a copy of my first comic, “Phantom Jack,” about a newspaper reporter who used invisibility powers to right wrongs. Cleveland soon responded with a cassette tape that had a Phantom Jack theme song. In the accompanying note, he said he had access to a full music studio and recorded the song by layering music and vocals.

The cassette stunned me. It was so professional that I thought perhaps he had taken an existing song and added a vocal track.

Cleveland called and asked how I liked the tape. I said it was amazing and asked if it was original or made by sampling other artist’s compositions.

He seemed insulted.

“I did that all myself,” he said.

It was the last time I underestimated his talent.

After I got to know him, the idea that he was a convicted killer seemed less and less real.

By 2005, I was assembling artists to illustrate a graphic novel I was writing for Image Comics called “Tales of the Starlight Drive-In.”

It’s a series of connected stories set in a drive-in theater that had an original story Continue reading →