Wrongfully Accused Men Freed After 22 Years
Everyone has watched a movie or television show where someone is charged with a crime they did not commit. In most cases, the person wrongly accused gets off the hook and the true bad guy is caught because in television the police always get the right guy. In the real world, the police do not always get the right person. In many cases, the police pursue and even convict the wrong person. In such cases, there is nothing more important than securing the best defense lawyer possible.
A perfect example is the story of Antonio Yarbough and Shariff Wilson, two men who spent the majority of their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit. According to CNN, Antonio and Shariff came home from socializing with their friends to find Antonio’s mother, little sister and female cousin stabbed to death on the floor of their home. The two boys, ages 18 and 15 called the police and were later arrested for the triple homicide. Without privately-retained lawyers to defend them, the two boys were completely defenseless when the police bullied them into confessing. The two teenage boys spent 21 years and seven months in a maximum-security prison.
There cannot be many things worse than spending the majority of a person’s young life behind bars and being blamed for the gruesome murder of one’s own family. Yarbough told CNN that he could not afford a lawyer and thus did not secure one. Had a privately retained attorney defended them, they would not have walked into prison as teenagers and walked out in their late forties. According to Yarbough’s interview, they were released due to DNA evidence that linked the murders to another man. Like most things that rely on people, the US legal system has flaws and good people pay for those flaws more often than they should.
Proven attorneys aim to protect innocent people from wrongful convictions. Although it is nice to think that the police always get the right person; in the real world it is a very real possibility that instead of justice for the murder of one’s family, an innocent man can sit in prison until his youth is gone, while the world believed he killed two little girls and his own mother. If you or a loved one have been wrongfully accused of a crime, Mark C. Cogan is ready to fight for your future!
