Glenn Ford had always maintained his innocence.
“My sons, when I left, was babies. Now they’re grown men with babies,” Glenn Ford told reporters. The 64-year-old has been released from prison after spending nearly half his life on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
“The prosecution withheld evidence and relied on faulty forensics,” Marc Hyden of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty told The Libertarian Republic. “He is the 144th person released from death row because he was wrongly convicted.”
Ford’s conviction relied largely on the testimony of a woman named Marvella Brown, who has admitted to having lied during Ford’s trial.
In the last 23 years, 2,000 prisoners have been exonerated after being falsely convicted of serious crimes. The most common element in these convictions is a reliance on faulty witness testimony. If our justice system is to avoid outrages like the one to which Ford was subjected, it must begin to temper itself with a healthy skepticism towards human reliability.
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