Being a Marin native, I regularly drive by San Quentin State Prison, and every time I do, I think about the innocent people stuck there for years, decades, or even a life. It’s a simple fact of our justice system that people, especially poor people of color, are doing the time though they didn’t do the crime. In the NYT (Gift Article), Corey Kilgannon shares the incredible story of How 5 Convicted Murderers Banded Together to Get Out of Sing Sing Prison. In addition to being wrongly convicted, the group is connected by a reporter named Dan Slepian, who became a one-man innocence project, and “the same troubling traits common in wrongful convictions, including sloppy detective work, questionable legal representation, shaky witness identifications and withheld evidence.” These patterns are common. Overturning convictions based on them isn’t.

+ Here’s a look at one of Dan Slepian’s NBC News reports that led to Richard Rosario’s exoneration. Rosario provided “authorities with 13 alibi witnesses to confirm he had been in Florida when the murder was committed in the Bronx. Neither the authorities nor his own lawyers ever went to Florida to interview them.”