Wrongful Convictions | 60 Minutes Full Episodes
In a Nutshell
Wrongful convictions destroy multiple lives: prosecutors admitted stacking the deck with weak evidence, no Black jurors, and incompetent defense counsel, sending Glenn Ford to death row for 30 years before exoneration and release with stage-four cancer and no compensation. The Hasty Mart case shows how coerced testimony from a paid informant and ignored confessions from actual perpetrators led to two innocent men serving 22 years. Healing Justice retreats reveal that wrongful convictions inflict lifelong trauma on both exonerees and crime victims, who must confront each other's parallel suffering to begin recovery.
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There may be no greater miscarriage of justice than to wrongfully convict a person of murder and sentence him to death. This happened to Glenn Ford, who spent nearly 30 years on death row in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison until new evidence revealed he did not commit the murder. He was one of 149 inmates freed from death row since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
In all those exonerations, prosecutor Marty Stroud admitted his role and apologized for his mistakes in sending an innocent man to death row. Stroud speaks of an injustice he calls so great it destroyed two lives, Glenn Ford's and his own.
I ended up without anybody else's help putting a man on death row who didn't belong there. I mean, at the end of the day, beginning, end, middle, whatever you want to call it, I did something that was very, very bad.
It was 1983 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and 32-year-old prosecutor Marty Stroud was assigned his first death penalty case. A local jeweler named Isadore Rosman had been robbed and murdered. Stroud zeroed in on Glenn Ford, who had done yard work for Rosman and was known to be a petty thief. Ford admitted he had pawned some of the stolen jewelry, which was enough to make him the primary suspect. Stroud knew a conviction would boost his career.
I was arrogant, narcissistic, caught up in the culture of winning.
Stroud now admits there was a question about other people's involvement that he should have followed up on but didn't. He describes his failure as cowardness.
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