Centurion Ministries and Exonerations

"McCloskey labors to exonerate innocent prisoners," is the title of a report in New Jersey's Star-Ledger written by Sarah Golin.

In August, Daryl Burton was sitting in a jail cell in Jefferson City, Mo., serving the 24th year of his sentence for the shooting death of a gas station attendant.

On Saturday, Burton stood in a leafy Princeton backyard under a white tent with about 125 other partygoers as a light rain fell.

"This seems surreal. I'm still pinching myself," said Burton, 46. "This is unbelievable."

Burton had been sentenced to 75 years in prison for the 1984 slaying, a crime he said he didn't commit. He was freed Aug. 29 after an eight-year legal effort by the Rev. Jim McCloskey and McCloskey's co-workers at the Princeton-based Centurion Ministries.

McCloskey has been laboring nearly 30 years to exonerate innocent prisoners, and on Saturday he hosted a gathering in his yard to celebrate seven men released from jail in the past two years.

"Each of these seven men spent anywhere from 24 to 30 years in prison for the crimes of other people. Collectively they spent 188 years in prison," McCloskey told the crowd, which included the seven men and their families, lawyers and investigators who worked on the cases, other exonerated inmates, and well-to-do Princeton supporters of Centurion.

In the Missouri case, Centurion investigators uncovered key witnesses who had never been presented to the defense.

Going to prison will change anyone, Burton said, "but when you are in prison for a crime you didn't commit, that just compounds the issue. ... You have to face physical, mental and emotional trauma, and you never know what's going to happen day to day. ... And you haven't done anything to be there."

And:

Centurion has brought freedom to 43 inmates since its first case in 1983, poring over documents, re-interviewing witnesses or running down people the police never talked to.

"We're like the tortoise," said Kate Germond, who met McCloskey in 1986 after reading an article about him in the New York Times. She became Centurion's second paid staff member and is now its co-director.

Germond, 61, says it may take Centurion five years of investigating to decide whether to take a case. If the case is accepted, it typically takes another five years before the person has a shot at freedom.

Careful vetting, she says, is how they determine a person is truly innocent, because instincts are often wrong. "Sometimes, the nicest guys turn out to be guilty, and the jerkiest guys turn out to be innocent," she said.

Costs for each case range from $150,000 to $300,000, according to McCloskey. Overall, the organization has an annual budget of about $1 million, most of it from private donors.

And:

David Dobbs, who has a private law practice in Tyler Texas, was the first assistant district attorney in Smith County, Texas, during the retrials of convicted killer Kerry Max Cook in the mid-1990s. The death-penalty case was hard-fought.

"It started out friendly" but turned bitter and somewhat personal, Dobbs recalled.

"Still, I actually like him," he said of McCloskey, who helped win Cook's release in 1997. "I think he is very zealous, and sometimes he goes down the wrong trail, but I have no hard feelings for him. ... He is so passionate, it's hard for him to see."

Kerry Max Cook was released from Texas prison after serving 22 years on death row.  His book, Chasing Justice, is available in the Books category in the right-column.  More on Kerry is here.