Slate posts, "Why Is Justin Wolfe Still in Prison?" It's by Dahlia Lithwick.
A few years back, I wrote about prosecutorial misconduct in the Northern Virginia capital murder trial of Justin Wolfe. The case was one of several in the news at the time in which prosecutors hid evidence that would have helped the defendant, or strong-armed a witness into falsely testifying. Prosecutors in Wolfe’s case seem to have done both. When I wrote about his case in 2011, it looked like Wolfe’s prosecution was finally over. It wasn’t. He’s still in prison.
Wolfe is back on the radar this week because he was featured in Episode 7 of Serial, the new podcast from the creators of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. As part of her investigation into the prosecution and conviction of Adnan Syed for a 1999 Baltimore murder, Koenig found her way to Wolfe and one of his vast team of lawyers and defenders, Deirdre Enright, the director of the University of Virginia Innocence Project Clinic. (Disclosure: Enright is a friend.) In the podcast, Koenig said it was “uncanny how many similarities” there are between Adnan Syed’s case and Justin Wolfe’s. She interviewed Enright at length about flaws in Syed’s prosecution and holes in the police’s case. For Syed, getting his conviction vacated, as Wolfe did, would be the ultimate victory. But that raises an obvious question: If Wolfe was vindicated, then why is he still in prison?
Earlier coverage of Justin Wolfe's case begins at the link. Related posts are in the prosecutorial category index.
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