Talk Justice
Stories cultivate social justice. They build relationships and go beyond creating awareness. Stories create empathy. Human to human, stories create understanding and surface commonalities. Talk Justice is a video interview series of those that have been wrongfully incarcerated, sharing their stories and discussing issues around criminal justice reform. These are survivors of the oppressive system some call justice. These are the stories that must be heard, from the people who survived to tell.
The Exonerated
Shabaka Shakur
Shabaka Shakur was exonerated after 27 years of being wrongfully convicted in 1989 due to false testimony by Brooklyn detective Louis Scarcella.
Jeff Deskovic
Jeff Deskovic's conviction was overturned and he was released from prison in 2006 after 16 years. Errors were made throughout the entire case, including tunnel vision by both police and the previous prosecutor, along with reliance on profiling which turned out to be completely incorrect, followed by deliberate downplaying of the DNA evidence that ultimately proved Deskovic was innocent.
Alan Newton
On July 6, 2006, Alan Newton was exonerated. He had asked for DNA testing in 1994, and his request was denied because evidence had been presumed to be lost. In 2005, at the Innocence Project’s request, the district attorney’s office found the rape kit after an exhaustive search. Post-conviction DNA testing then proved that Newton was not the perpetrator of this crime.
Huwe Burton
On January 24, 2019 Bronx Supreme Court Justice Steven Barrett vacated the 1991 murder conviction of Huwe Burton. Justice Barrett based his decision on findings by the Bronx District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) that detectives from the 47th precinct had coerced Burton into falsely confessing to murdering his mother when he was just 16 years old.