Summary Of The Innocence Project

The United States leads the entire world in the number of incarcerations, there are approximately 2 million people behind bars at this time, that means that a wrongful conviction rate of 1% would translate to 20,000. Though we do not have a steady percentage of falsely accused individuals, simply 1% is still a large amount of innocent citizens. The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and hopes to adjust the criminal justice system to prevent future cases of injustice. Their website contains hundreds unethical incarcerations and convictions, including Cathy Woods and Kathy Gonzalez, two of the only women in their entire database.

As mentioned before, Cathy Woods is one of the few women written about by The

Kathy Gonzalez was sentenced to ten years after agreeing to plead guilty and testify falsely to her alleged role in the crime of raping and murdering a 68-year-old woman in Beatrice, Nebraska. The case all started on the night of February 5th, 1985; Helen Wilson was in her apartment, where she lived alone, when she was sexually assaulted, stabbed, and suffocated to death. Semen, blood, along with fingerprints, were all found and collected at the crime scene. A car was seen near Wilson’s home the night of the crime, an Oldsmobile Cutlass similar to one driven by Gonzalez’s co-defendant Thomas Winslow, it was searched and eventually returned. Investigative officers were aware of similar crimes in the neighborhood in the summer of 1983, which is approximately 18 months before this attack, attempted sexual assaults of elderly women within four blocks of Wilson’s home. Four years later, Thomas Winslow was in jail for an unrelated incident when he is approached by investigators, asking for help solving the 1985 murder, saying he could be released on his pending charge. Little did Winslow know, these investigators had already spoken with someone who pointed Winslow and several others in the crime. Separately, Ada JoAnn Taylor allegedly told law enforcement that Winslow and another man named Joseph White were involved in the crime, in the same general time frame, another man named James Dean admitted to his involvement in the crime. Ultimately, based on the statements given by alleged participants and informants, a total of six people were arrested and charged in 1989, for the murder – Thomas Winslow, Joseph White, Ada JoAnn Taylor, James Dean, Debra Shelden, and Kathy